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Octavia Hill From a painti »e ^ &»»*«»* 



GOOD HOUSING 
THAT PAYS 



A STUDY OF THE AIMS AND THE 
ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE 

OCTAVIA HILL 
ASSOCIATION 

1896-1917 



By 
FULLERTON L. WALDO 



Philadelphia : 

THE HARPER PRESS 
1012-20 Chancellor Street 

1917 



T5U 



Copyright 1917 

BY 

Harper Printing Company 






OCT I6ISI7 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 



CLA477053 






D 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 
f 

I 

Page 
Foreword 7 

II 
Octavia Hill 11 

III 
The Association 21 

IV 
Days Afield 77 

V 
Does it pay? 103 

VI 
Appendices Ill — 121 

Index 123 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Page 
Portrait of Octavia Hill Frontispiece 

A court improved 20 

Calling for a change 23 

Montrose Street 29 

Casa Ravello 35 

Monroe Street 41 

Workman Place 45 

Workman Place — -Interior view of yard 47 

Interior view of Workman Place 49 

East Rittenhouse St., Germantown 53 

East Rittenhouse St., rear, after improvement 55 

New Houses — East Rittenhouse St. property 57 

Plan of dwellings for the Philadelphia Model Homes Company ... 61 

Plans of Richmond Houses 62-64 

Houses of the Richmond Group — Playground in the rear .... 67 

Gaul St. houses, Richmond Group 69 

Chart showing the increase in the number of properties owned by the 

Octavia Hill Association from 1896 to 1915 . . 73 

Philadelphia homes altered to tenement houses ........ 79 

Franklin Court before renovation 87 

Franklin Court after renovation 89 

Court of North Third St. property before renovation 97 

Court of North Third St. property after renovation 99 



FOREWORD 



PHILADELPHIA is called the City of Homes with good 
reason. Come into her ample confines from any point 
you please and you see row upon row of little two-story, 
stone-stepped houses of red brick, perhaps with a grass-plot front 
or rear, shade trees in a singular variety, and a certain distinctive 
contentment and prosperity in the very air above the myriad 
simmering chimneys. 

For all her malodorous misgovernment of time past, whose 
survivals are being eradicated step by step, with a long stride 
forward for each disheartening setback, it is a crowning glory 
of Philadelphia that thousands upon thousands of these little 
houses have held their own all these years, instead of the teeming, 
noisome rookeries that are the bane of many another metropolis. 

A million people — more than half the population — live in 
single dwellings. 

There are tenements, of recent origin: there is in prospect 
a tenement problem. But the satisfaction of the developed 
instinct of the home-builders and housekeepers of Philadelphia 
does not lie in the direction of the sky-scraping multiple dwelling, 
which replaces a front porch with a fire-escape, makes a box of 
geraniums or a rubber-plant do duty for a garden, festoons the 
vista between towering walls with "the short and simple flannels 
of the poor," and suspends the growing child like Mahomet's 
coffin half-way between a clouded heaven of grimy skylight or 
gravelled roof and the cluttered inferno of the pavement far below. 

Philadelphia families, accustomed to think of health and 
comfort largely in terms of the upgrowing generation, prefer 
privacy to promiscuity, and love their own vine and fig-tree, 
rising from the ground level, with the tenacious affection that 
attaches to a patriarchal inheritance. Where the individual 
home is an impossible luxury, the multiple dwelling that is reared 
must recognize the right of the family to every procurable blessing 
and convenience of the single house. 



FOREWORD 



The pages that follow describe the effort of a thoughtful group 
of Philadelphians to provide cleanly homes and a healthy en- 
vironment for families in modest circumstances or in self-respect- 
ing poverty. This effort — now twenty-one years old — has out- 
grown the stage of experiment, but it never will deny new light 
nor wholly abandon, however it may adapt, the ideals that are 
Octavia Hill's own spiritual legacy. Who this great and good 
woman was and what she did for humanity are explained in the 
opening chapter. The life-story of the work in Philadelphia that 
perpetuates her name and her influence is next set forth. The 
reader is then taken into the places where the Association has 
labored to clean out and to build up in order that sun and air 
and running water may perform their medicinal offices for body 
and soul together; that germs and vermin may be routed with 
the dirt that breeds them; that babies may have a chance to 
grow into decent and useful citizens; that a sense of neighborli- 
ness and interdependence may be fostered even among those 
whose nationality, religion and language are diverse. 

From first to last this is an enterprise of business, and not of 
charitable dole. We therefore are given to see the "friendly 
rent-collector" going from door to door, gently but firmly insisting 
upon payment when the stipulated sum falls due. We find her 
lending an ear as " guide, philosopher and friend" to a wide 
category of troubles great and small — none too large and none 
too minute for her fearless and sympathetic consideration. She 
does not give alms. She makes no vague and lavish promises 
of benefits to fall like manna from the skies. She bestows aid 
upon those who help themselves. She is a walking delegate, not 
of insurrection and discontent but of courage and self-respect, 
and the inculcation of thrift and cleanliness and personal responsi- 
bility. 

We are taken on his rounds with the Superintendent, whose 
function is the oversight of the work of tearing down and building 
up, of constructing and of reconstructing, in all its phases. We 
see that a great deal of the effort of the bricklayer and the car- 
penter, the plasterer and the plumber, under this shrewd 
and constant oversight goes to the rebuilding of old houses, and 
the adaptation of decadent dwellings to the modern advantage 



FOREWORD 



of those who have suffered under conscienceless and grinding 
owners, mindful of profit only. 

The work of the Association in the capacity of agent for 
properties it does not hold is set forth, and the question of the 
worth-whileness of the undertaking is finally considered. 

The writer has been aided without stint at every turn by those 
whose names appear in the text, and whose self-effacement pre- 
cludes a proper acknowledgment of their help. He will remember 
always the mothers and fathers and children met in the course 
of his social exploration from house to house. He has merely 
written this little book: they have been the making of it. 



Philadelphia, 

September 1, 1917 



II 

OCTAVIA HILL 
December 3, 1838— August 13, 1912. 



"Let us be gentle, because we know so little." 

— Letter to my Fellow- Workers, 1S79. 

"But, if you let one touch of terror dim your sight, and flinch before 
the most terrible upheaval of rampant force, or threat; if, for popular 
favor, or seat at board, or success on platform, you hesitate to speak what 
you know to be true, then shall your cowardice and your ambition be indeed 
answerable for consequences which vou little dream of." 

—Ibid, 1889. 



MANY a Browning Society has little to do with Brown- 
ing, and many a reading circle takes Shakespeare's 
name in vain: but in the case of the Octavia Hill Asso- 
ciation there is so close a correspondence between the work and 
the practical idealism of the woman w T hose name it bears that 
a study of her career of service to humanity in England and 
thus throughout the world sheds light upon the organized and 
incorporated effort in Philadelphia. 

Octavia Hill was the eighth daughter among eleven children 
of James Hill of Peterborough. Her mother was the third wife 
of Mr. Hill, who inherited his father's successful business as corn- 
merchant and upon the proceeds came to grief as a banker. 
Altruist, reformer and book-lover, the financial panics of 1825 
and 1840 were too much for him. Upon his mental and physical 
collapse, Octavia's mother took her daughters to a cottage at 
Finchley, provided by her father, Dr. Southwood Smith, the 
noted sanitarian. 

When Octavia was thirteen, her mother removed to London 
to become manager of a Guild for the employment of women. 
One of the workers at the Guild lent Octavia books and pamphlets 
on the life of the poor, which so greatly depressed her that "she 
began to think that all laughter or amusement was wicked." 

11 



12 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS 



But she was cured of that delusion when she was given an 
active part in the work of the Guild, and found how necessary 
fun and frolic are to relieve the monotony of working lives. 

The little Octavia was put in charge of a work-room in which 
girls of about her own age made toys. Since she was poor herself, 
she realized to the full their lives of drudgery and hardship, and 
she did all she could to make them happy. Some years later 
she wrote of this period: "We were so very, very poor, and home 
was like a little raft in a dark storm, where the wonder every 
day was whether we could live through it; and now the sea looks 
calm, even if there are waves; and we have leisure to look at the 
little boat in which we sail. I wonder if it will ever be painted 
with high colors." 

It was at about this time that Octavia asked Ruskin to teach 
her drawing; and his assent brought a new and a constraining 
influence to bear on all her life. "I would give years," she wrote 
after the meeting, "if I could bring to Ruskin 'the peace which 
passeth all understanding.'" Ruskin told her she was "far more 
accurate" than any of his college pupils. No wonder Ruskin, 
the artist and ameliorist at once, found her an apt pupil, taking 
fire from the gleam of his own restless inspiration. 

An address by Kingsley, delivered before an association of 
women created to promote sanitary reform, helped Octavia, at 
twenty, to visualize her objective. Kingsley adverted to the fact 
that small houses were passing more and more into the possession 
of individuals, and declared that legislation must recognize the 
fact. "He was not going into the question here; it would have 
to be attended to, but it seemed a great way off. Therefore he 
hoped women would go, not only to the occupiers, but to the 
possessors of the house, and influence people of 'our own class.'" , 

In this, her summary of the speaker's somewhat vague and 
not over-optimistic conclusions with regard to the possibility 
of legislative action, Octavia seems to be feeling a challenge to 
the deepest in her nature, and to a maturing if not a finally fixed 
conviction. 

At the end of 1860, just after Octavia's twenty-second birth- 
day, came an event of moment — one of the great crises in her 
life, her biographer styles it — in the removal to 14 Nottingham 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 13 

Place. She arranged to have poor women come to the house 
weekly to sew. One night a woman fainted, and Miss Hill's 
sympathetic inquiry elicited the fact that she had not slept the 
previous night; she had been washing clothes and rocking the 
baby's cradle at the same time with her foot. 

Miss Hill called at the poor woman's home next day, and found 
that it was a damp, unsanitary kitchen. 

She then tried to find other and better quarters, but there 
was no place where they would take the children. She was given 
in her quest to realize that at her very door there were squalid, 
teeming homes like those from which the little toy-workers came; 
and she brooded upon the sorrowful fact. 

L T nder the cloud she came to Ruskin to bring him some of 
her drawings. She found him in a pessimistic frame of mind. 

"I paint, take my mother for a drive, dine with friends, or 
answer these correspondents," he said, as he pulled out some 
letters from his pocket, "but one longs to be doing something- 
more satisfying." 

"Most of us feel like that at times," ventured the devoted 
pupil. 

"Well, what would you like to be doing?" was Ruskin's reply. 

"Something to provide better homes for the poor," was the 
girl's answer. 

Ruskin wheeled sharply about in his chair. 

"Have you a business plan?" was his challenge. 

Then and there Octavia Hill's life-work w r as born. 

Ruskin told her he had no time to attend to the details of 
management as landlord, but he said he would buy a tenement 
house if she would run it for him. 

He wanted five per cent, on his investment. He didn't care 
for the money, he said, but he thought others would be far more 
likely to follow the example set if the enterprise were put on a 
business basis from the start. 

"Who will ever hear of what I do?" exclaimed Octavia. 

But she entered whole-heartedly into the fulfilment of the 
suggestion, and said she would do her best to make the scheme pay. 

Then began the long, long search for a house, with a garden, 
where she might create modest and wholesome apartments for 



14 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

the poor. Landlords and agents as soon as they learned what 
she was after interposed all manner of objections. 

In answer to one of these heartless rebuffs Octavia exclaimed : 
" Where, then, are the poor to live?" 

"I don't know," said the agent. "I only know they've got 
to keep away from the St. John's Wood Estate." 

In the spring of 1865, she was able to announce triumphantly 
that Ruskin had bought for her, for a term of fifty-six years, 
three houses in a court close by. The tenants came with the 
houses. She had schemes for the recreation of the children, and 
she meant to secure a playground for them. "The plan promises 
to pay; but of this I say very little; so very much depends on 
management, and the possibility of avoiding bad debts." To 
Mrs. Shaen, wife of the lawyer who negotiated the sale, she wrote 
presently: "The money part is very regular and simple, just so 
much paid into Ruskin's bank each quarter; but to me the work 
is of engrossing interest. We have three houses, each with six 
rooms; and we have managed gradually to get the people to 
take two rooms, in many cases." The garden had come with 
Ruskin's enthusiastic purchase of six more houses; and the cup 
of the busy landlady's satisfaction is filled to overflowing. "The 
children seem to have so few joys, and they spring to meet any 
suggestion of employment with such eagerness, instead of fighting 
and sitting in the gutter, with dirty faces and listless, vacant 
expression. I found an eager little crowd threading beads last 
time I was in the playground. We hope to get some tiny gardens 
there; and Ruskin has promised some seats. I hope to teach 
them to draw a little; singing we have already introduced. On 
the whole, I am so thankful, so glad, so hopeful in it all; and, 
when I remember the old days when I seemed so powerless, I 
am almost awed." 

Here we see in embryo several present-day social movements 
of wide outreach, all at once: — the suggestion and direction of 
children's games; the cultivation of home and school gardens; 
community singing. 

The new owner found the houses occupied — to quote her own 
words — "by a desperate and forlorn set of people; wild, dirty, 
violent, ignorant as ever I have seen." 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 15 

"I worked on quite alone about it," she tells us, " preferring 
power and responsibility and work, to committees, and their 
slow, dull movements." 

But as soon as she let her friends know what she was doing, 
they rallied in force to her assistance. 

Presently in the crowding multiplicity of detail her life be- 
came, she tells us, " a fight for mere existence. References, notices, 
rents, repairs, the dry necessary matters of business, take up 
almost all time and thought; only" — and here comes the saving 
clause — "as, after all, we are human beings, and not machines, 
people round, and all we see and hear, leave a kind of mark on 
us; an impression of awe, or pity and wonder, or sometimes love." 

"Here I am," she writes in another letter of about the same 
date, "head and ears deep in notices about dustmen, requests 
for lawyers to send accounts, etc., etc. . . . I've just come 
in from a round of visits to the nine houses; and somehow it's 
been a day of small worries about all sorts of repairs, and things 
of that kind. It is only when the detail is really managed on as 
great principles as the whole plan, that a work becomes really 
good." That last sentence holds the vital germ of Octavia Hill's 
own philosophy, living on in the work of the Association that 
bears her name. 

Instead of giving alms she gave herself. The student of her 
work cannot fail to note how sedulously she refrained from hand- 
ing out money when that would have been the easiest thing to do. 
In 1869 she had read a paper before the Social Science Association 
on "The Importance of Aiding the Poor Without Alms-giving," 
and on this point she was obdurate. Even her strong champion 
Ruskin was unwilling to go all the way with her in this policy, 
and he shrank from contact with the ugliness that she met to 
give it battle day after day. 

The Artisans' Dwelling Act in 1875 was a great parliamentary 
victory for housing reform, and it was in large part Miss Hill's 
victory. Moreover, the Committee which investigated the 
operation of the Act five years later owed much to Miss Hill's 
continued cooperation. This is the period of the specialized 
effort of Miss Hill in behalf of Open Spaces. When the bill for 
the artisans' houses came up for its second reading in the House 

2 



16 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

Miss Hill was present, tremulously eager of course to behold its 
reception and to know its fate. Suddenly, to her intense grati- 
fication, a speaker brought forward an article she had written 
for Macmillan's Magazine. 

" Instead of quoting dry facts and figures, he read aloud from 
it the description of the wonderful delight it gave me to see the 
courts laid open to the light and air." 

It may be remarked that no compilation of facts and figures 
will ever convey a fair idea of the work of Miss Hill or the work 
of the Octavia Hill Association. 

By 1877 Miss Hill's work had grown till it concerned the wel- 
fare of 3,500 tenants and the prudent husbandry of some $200,000 
in trust funds. Lord Pembroke gave Miss Hill $30,000 to buy 
houses, and paid a worker. Then she had to go away to rest, 
and the years from 1878 to 1880 were spent chiefly in travel, 
that took her to the Levant, though she kept in contact with 
her ruling passion by intimate and affectionate correspondence. 

Upon her final return she was asked by the Ecclesiastical 
Commissioners to undertake the management of much of their 
property in Southwark. She accepted the charge. She began 
the successful movement which lasted six years, from 1883 to 
1889, to add Parliament Hill, and a tract adjoining, to Hamp- 
stead Heath. This achievement must stand among her greatest 
benefactions to humanity. It meant obtaining $1,500,000 by 
private gift and municipal appropriation, and not merely saving 
a great playground of the poor but doubling its area. 

She took charge of forty-eight houses in Deptford, in South 
London, in 1884, and in 1885 accepted the responsibility for 
seventy-eight more in the same region. In 1887 the number of 
tenants had increased to 5,000. The Red Cross Cottages and 
Garden in Southwark opened in June of this year are salient 
examples of Miss Hill's magic wand in ousting ugliness and 
creating graciousness and beauty in its place. The hall, designed 
for music and other neighborhood entertainment, has unusual 
decorations by Walter Crane, representing just such actions of 
peaceful heroism as any one of us, at any time, might be called 
on to perform. The first picture was that of Alice Ayres, a servant 
girl, who saved children from a fire in Southwark. Since the 



THE OCTAYIA HILL ASSOCIATION' 17 

heroine came from their own walk in life, and was known to 
some of them, the tenants felt a living link of interest with the 
painting. 

The burden of the Deptford Cottages was progressively taken 
over by an enlarging number of assistants. Though many of 
these were volunteers, since Miss Hill never surrendered her 
belief in the system that brought women of refinement and leisure 
into contact with those whose lot was toiling poverty, the desir- 
ability of the service of professional supervisors was recognized, 
and over each group of houses as served by the volunteer assistants 
there was set a paid worker to direct the collection of the rents 
and all the diversified effort for the welfare of the tenants. 

After a time these head women and their charges, while they 
never ceased to look to Miss Hill for guidance and inspiration, 
became more and more independent of her actual oversight, 
and as they gained confidence and knowledge the work became 
progressively decentralized. 

Miss Hill was one of the pillars of the Kyrle Society, created 
by her sister Miranda, which sought to bring beauty into the 
lives of the poor, to secure open spaces, and to convert city burial 
grounds in congested areas to the uses of the living. She was a 
prime mover in the Charity Organization Society, earnestly 
striving to keep before that body the paramount importance of 
personality in charity, and the influence of enthusiastic and warm- 
hearted individual effort for individuals. She was a member 
of the Women's University Settlement in Blackfriars' Road. 
She was one of the founders of the National Trust for Places of 
Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She was a member of the 
Royal Commission on the Poor Laws. She saved land along 
the banks of the River Wandle from desecration, for the perennial 
joy of the poor. After her " Homes of the London Poor" had 
been translated into German by Princess Alice, the Octavia Hill 
Verein was formed in Berlin. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee 
took counsel with her, and installed her methods in groups of 
houses municipally controlled. The housing system in Amster- 
dam was influenced by her work, and traces of it are to be found 
in Sweden. Students of her methods came from near and far 
to be instructed. The effort of such women as Ellen Collins and 



18 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

Jcsephine Shaw Lowell in New York gladly acknowledged the 
impress of Miss. Hill's ideals. 

Aside from her personal correspondence, the record of bene- 
ficent activity is to be found in her two volumes, "Homes of the 
London Poor," and "Our Common Land," and in the series of 
annual "Letters to My Fellow-workers," privately circulated, 
which began in 1873 and continued until December, 1911. 

"The main tone of action," she affirms, in ''Homes of the 
London Poor," "must be severe. There is much of rebuke and 
repression needed, although a deep and silent under-current of 
sympathy and pity may flow beneath. If the rent is not ready, 
notice to quit must be served." 

An all-important factor is the "friendly rent-collector" who, 
while firm in her insistence upon prompt payment of the rent, 
forms a living link of sympathy and perception between the 
landlord or landlady and the tenant, and among the tenants 
themselves. The thorough training of this collector is essential, 
and for this training Miss Hill left minute prescriptions. 

In her Letter for 1879, Miss Hill says, — and she repeats the 
passage in the Letter for 1896, — "All the smoky chimneys, 
broken water-pipes, tiresome neighbors, drunken husbands, 
death, disease, poverty, sin, call not only for your sympathy but 
for your action." 

"You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately. 
The principle on which the whole work rests, is that the inhabi- 
tants and their surroundings must be improved together," she 
writes in "Homes of the London Poor." 

Miss Hill wanted trees planted and vines trained against the 
houses, and gardens wherever possible. She cites with approval 
the example of children who thrust flowers in a crevice in the 
wall, to make it, as they said, "like it was the day we had the 
May-pole." "A bunch of flowers brought on purpose," is men- 
tioned among the gifts that are not destructive of independence, 
and that assist what she beautifully calls the "return to the old 
fellowship between rich and poor." "She takes them flowers" 
is part of her commendation of one of her friends who went tact- 
fully among her people. In a touching Letter she speaks of 



THE OOTAYJA HILL ASSOCIATION 19 

widows who came home from a country outing with wild flowers 
to surprise the children when they woke in the morning. 

She pleads for organized, directed play, in behalf of children 
" wholly ignorant of games," who "have hardly self-control 
enough to p\&y at any which have an object or require effort." 
She holds that there must be play supervisors for a playground 
she has started, and "these I hope to find more and more." 

In one of the Letters she asks for public music definitely 
planned and schooled. "I hope that we may have a more or- 
ganized body of singers, led by a conductor whom they know, 
and ready to sing in out-of-the-way places." In another Letter 
she refers to the value of uplifting music on Sundays, and of a 
violin class. 

Of a cadet corps for the boys she heartily approved. "There 
is no organization which I have found influence so powerfully 
for good the boys in such a neighborhood." The Boy Scouts of 
today would have been to her a cause for devout thanksgiving. 

In the Letter for 1907 she gives it as her belief that the work 
of agency in the management of properties for others is destined 
to expand significantly. This, of course, has become a most 
important part of the work of the Octavia Hill Association. 

With each of the Letters there appears a financial balance- 
sheet reduced to simplest terms of receipts and expenditure. 
Behind these items, she declares, are "trembling hopes and fears 
about each individual." 

The book "Our Common Land" sets forth chiefly Miss Hill's 
views on the vital issue of open spaces, — "open air sitting-rooms" 
she called them. She yearns to bring the people at large into 
the air and the light of day. The two great wants in the life of 
the poor are the want of space and the want of beauty. She has 
much to say of the mortmain of the city graveyard that keeps 
the living out of an available breathing space. 

The last decade of Miss Hill's life saw the fruition of the years 
of anxiety and uncertainty, but there was no cessation of labor. 
"Up to within three days of her death," writes her biographer, 
"she continued to see her friends and fellow-workers, using to 
the utmost her failing strength, and endeavoring to arrange for 
the efficient carrying on of the many works in which she took 



20 



GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS 



such a keen interest." When they told her that the end must be, 
she said, thinking only of her work, "I might have given it a few 
more touches, but I think it is nearly all planned now, very well." 
On the night of August 13, 1912, in the words of her beloved 
Chaucer, her " spirit changed house." 

"O human soul! as long as thou canst so 

Set up a mark of everlasting light 

Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, 

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam — 

Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night ! 

Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." 




A Court Improved. 



Ill 

THE ASSOCIATION 

ANY enterprise of social amelioration has its doubting 
Thomases and its Job's comforters to contend with at 
the beginning, and the Octavia Hill Association has not 
been exempt from the need of explaining wiry it should exist, 
and why good citizens should uphold its ministration. 

There are terrible homes for the underworld of Vienna called 
"Massenhotels." It is a common experience to find twenty or 
thirty people of both sexes living in one room, each occupant 
paying ten cents a week for a quarter of a bed. Sometimes the 
room is windowless. Disease is rife, and the stench of the filthy 
bodies and the filthy clothing that clutters the rotting walls is 
intolerable. 

"Thank God we have nothing like that here in Philadelphia!" 
exclaimed a good woman, throwing up her hands at this descrip- 
tion. "It's too bad that they can't have the Octavia Hill Associa- 
tion in cities that need it more." 

But these festering, sweltering Poles, Jews, Slovaks and Croats 
of darkest Vienna are the submerged ones of a capital whose 
municipal motto is "On with the Dance;" whose name is the 
synonym of gayety and folly. These miserable folk, who call 
a little thin potato soup and a thimbleful of bad brandy a square 
meal, may have reached a lower stratum of existence than most 
Americans have seen. Does that excuse a complacency that takes 
it for granted that whatever is out of sight under the lid in Phila- 
delphia, San Francisco, Chicago or New Orleans is all right? 

Philadelphia has a Civic Club that has been a blessing to 
the city in its work for the reign of law, through the virtuous 
energizing of good women. It has battled for everything that 
makes for better conditions of housing and of living in a city. 
The list of good works it has brought out of dreamland into the 
light of common day is as diversified as the life of the great city 

21 



22 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

which the persistent effort of this Club has sweetened and en- 
nobled. It was but natural that the Octavia Hill Association 
should have its genesis among friends in council who met in the 
hospitable quarters of the Club in the winter and spring of 1895- 
96 to study the large and many-angled problem of fair play for 
the metropolitan poor. 

There had been previous efforts, such as that of the Benevolent 
Building Association of 1865, to provide bright and cleanly 
dwellings for families of limited earning capacity. In 1885 a 
lending library for children, in the heart of a negro district at 
Seventh and St. Mary Streets, brought home to its benevolent 
promoters the need of a new and improved order of living in the 
hovels where the books were circulated. It was plain that a 
transformation was not to be wrought merely by the magic of 
good books. People must take hold of people; life must come 
into stimulating contact with life; the socially uplifted must 
discover that the economically downtrodden were their neighbors. 
Mr. Theodore Starr had already made an inspiring beginning 
near at hand. He had bought and razed horrid eyesores of dwell- 
ings and had put up in their place rows of well-built houses that 
appealed to a better class of tenants. The result of his enterprise 
was felt throughout the region. With the name of Theodore 
Starr, honoris causa, must be associated those of Edith Wright 
Gifford and Hannah Fox. The latter not merely bought and 
improved dwellings in this St. Mary Street district but personally 
undertook their management upon the successful plan of Octavia 
Hill which she so intimately understood. When she had studied 
the local problem in its practical aspects for several years, she 
met the beloved, untiring altruist, Mrs. William F. Jenks and 
others in the conferences mentioned, and in these sessions a 
report was discussed and prepared. They then went before the 
Civic Club with the report, and asked for its sanction and its 
furtherance. The Civic Club responded instantly and whole- 
heartedly, and the Octavia Hill Association was formed as an 
independent organization, to have for its specialized concern the 
provision of homes of the right sort, for families of modest means. 

Cooperation became corporation, under the laws of Pennsyl- 
vania, June 25, 1896. Nathaniel B. Crenshaw was the first 




( AI.T.TNd FOB A CHANGE 



23 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 25 

President; Frank H. Taylor was chosen Treasurer, and Mrs. 
Thomas S. Kirkbride became Secretary. The original Board of 
Directors comprised Miss Fox, Mr. Crenshaw, Mrs. Jenks, Mrs. 
Kirkbride, and Mr. Taylor. 

Mrs. Kirkbride — a tower of strength and of consecrated pur- 
pose in this work as in all movements for the greater good of the 
greater number in Philadelphia — expressed so perfectly the pur- 
pose of the new organization in her first report as secretary, 
(January 1, 1897) that we cannot do better than to use her state- 
ment here: 

"The object of the Civic Club," she wrote, "is 'to promote 
by education and active cooperation a higher public spirit and a 
better social order.' The Octavia Hill Association, although an 
independent organization, works for the same higher spirit and 
better order, on its own definite and restricted, but most im- 
portant, lines. It sees in insanitary, dilapidated, and overcrowded 
dwellings, influences which lower the moral and the physical 
health of Philadelphia. Against these evil influences it aims to 
enlist the cooperation of citizens who, well housed themselves, 
desire the same advantage for less fortunate Philadelphians. 
This cooperation is solicited on strict business conditions, and 
it is believed that a safe investment of capital and a fair rate of 
interest are offered." 

This first report announced that the modus operandi of the 
Association would be "-to refit old properties and small houses, 
first of all putting in modern plumbing and so far as possible 
removing all unheal thful surroundings." The report then describ- 
ed that ideal of the community of interest between landlord and 
tenant, realized through the friendly rent-collector as the inter- 
mediary, which is the central and the most inspiring feature of 
the personal phase of the undertaking. It was also announced 
that the Association stood ready to assume the kindly oversight 
of private property, to buy houses offered at a figure which would 
not be prohibitive of moderately profitable purchase and renova- 
tion, and to issue stock to subscribers. "The Association's 
strongest claim upon the confidence of the community," it was 
declared, "lies in the fact that its philanthropic interests arc 



26 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

founded on true business principles; its business interests upon 
the principles of a sound philanthropy." 

Upon this platform devised twenty-one years ago, the Asso- 
ciation has stood, and continues to stand. 

The stock company, empowered by its charter to hold, sell 
and lease real estate, fixed the par value of the stock at the low 
figure of $25, so that a great many persons might have a share 
and an active sustaining interest therewith. The distribution 
of profits would thus be effected easily, in the form of dividends 
on the capital stock. These dividends for the first two years 
were 4M per cent, per annum; the annual dividend since that 
time has been 4 per cent. At the end of 1916 the outstanding 
capital stock was $221,475, with an authorized capital of $300,000. 
There was a surplus of about $16,000, and the usual dividend of 
4 per cent, was declared, payable February 1, 1917. 

At the time of its incorporation as a stock company, the 
Association had a capital of $20,000. Many of the original group 
of stockholders were members of the Civic Club, who not merely 
subscribed but induced their friends to subscribe, thus giving an 
effectual assistance in the expansion of the Association that is 
beyond evaluation. At a special meeting in November, 1898, 
it was voted to increase the capital stock to $50,000. At the 
same meeting the number of directors was enlarged from five to 
seven, and Miss Helen L. Parrish and R. Francis Wood were 
added to the Board. In 1911, Miss Parrish became the secretary. 
She had studied the work of Miss Hill in London at first hand 
for some months, so that her experience has created a personal 
link across the seas between the work of the altruist in London 
and that of the Association here. 

Again and again, since the original purchases were made, 
individual members of the Board of Directors have assumed the 
management of properties, and have found a keen personal 
satisfaction in collecting the rents themselves and thus obtaining 
a first hand insight into the work that could be obtained in no 
other way. They have accordingly brought to the council-table 
a practical and detailed knowledge such as few philanthropic 
administrators have gained from within. Each of the directors 
is in active service on one of the Committees, which are those of 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOC IATIOX 27 

finance, new property, office-administration and rent-collecting, 
construction, inspection. As the work grew out of the day of 
small things, the increasing burden of executive supervision 
demanded the whole time of a personal representative of the 
Board, and in 1908 a superintendent was employed. Frederick 
C. Feld, a man of tact, enthusiasm and technical knowledge, now 
fills this all-important office. Miss Garrison, the chief rent- 
collector, has two regular and several volunteer assistants, and 
brings to her work a rare combination of sympathetic interest 
and the requisite firmness with the saving sense of humor wherein 
philanthropists and reformers are so often — rightly or wrongly — 
declared deficient. 

The Association gladly accepts intelligent volunteer assistance, 
but it believes also in the engagement of salaried employees who 
follow the assured routine of professional occupation. There 
are a bookkeeper, a stenographer, who has charge of the office, 
and a varying number of mechanics in the jurisdiction of the 
superintendent. When the Association began its work, the col- 
lectors depended for their stipend upon a commission of 5 per cent, 
from the rents collected. The clerical work was distributed 
among the directors and the treasurer's office. The first salaried 
employee was engaged in 1901; the employment of the book- 
keeper dates from 1907. It will be seen that the business affairs 
of the Association rest upon a foundation not dependent on the 
continued proffer of unremunerated aid. This is the basis which 
seems best, if the system is to be universally applied and stand- 
ardized. The problems of housing and sanitation are day-in 
and day-out problems that require a constant vigilance and not 
a divided interest or a sporadic enthusiasm that can detach itself 
at pleasure from the object of its concern. The work of volunteers 
is by no means undervalued in its unselfish service to this Asso- 
ciation. They have done, and are doing, admirable work. It 
is a great relief to these volunteers themselves to feel that if they 
must miss certain times and seasons, or withdraw altogether, 
the bottom will not fall out of the beneficent enterprise with 
which they have been identified. 

Furthermore, if the Association is understood to be an honest 
and legitimate competitor in the open market with other real 



28 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS': 

estate operators whose business is plain business, with no tincture 
of philanthropy, it does not seem expedient to rely upon gratui- 
tous service in work for which the ordinary operator must carry 
a pay-roll. Such a procedure, if the influence of an object-lesson 
is sought, does not convince the dealer who is without philan- 
thropic assistance that he can live up to the standards of decency, 
comfort, and cheapness his benevolent rival sets and still make 
a satisfactory profit. 

It does not fall within the scope of this discussion to follow 
from street to street or from one congested area to another each 
of the separate acquisitions in the long list of purchases and leases 
which the Association in the twenty-one years of its history has 
made, or to recapitulate all the managerial responsibilities which, 
to the gratification of the owners, it has from time to time as- 
sumed. But to the acquisition and development of certain 
typical properties we may profitably devote our attention, as 
symptomatic of what has taken place with the entire number. 
We must bear in mind, moreover, the wise principles of selection 
that have guided the Association in deciding where to employ 
its little army of busy hands in tearing down and building up, 
in redeeming foulness to fairness, in letting air and light enter 
where these had long been strangers. 

The Association has stipulated that the properties it took 
over should be in need of reconstruction and improvement; that 
the price should be sufficiently low to .-..allow of the necessary 
repairs and still leave a fair return on the sum invested; that 
the group dealt with should be large enough to present a conspicu- 
ous object-lesson to the community. Many a neighborhood 
must be — and is — a little ashamed to look itself in the face, after 
regarding the spick-and-span aspect of the Association improve- 
ment adjoining its unseemliness. 

In the properties acquired by the Association in the older 
parts of the city, these three types, speaking generally, are to be 
distinguished — the house that was built for one family and is 
now occupied by several families; the small, one family house on 
the narrow street or alley, having a yard of its own; the three- 
room rear dwelling, set in rows of from two to perhaps ten houses 
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the latter type there may be two facing rows, at the rear of two 
or three front lots. Or there may be a courtyard built round 
three sides. In the control of the Association as agent are several 
model tenements. It has erected a few small new houses, and 
will build more of these in future, to an indeterminate extent. 
It has built one large group of model houses for one or two families. 

If the people living in an old house acquired by the Association 
are law-abiding and respectable they are not disturbed. Some- 
times it is necessary to oust occupants whose room proves better 
than their company. 

In July, 1896, title was taken to the first of its properties by 
the Association — five houses near Seventh and South Streets. 
Four were small houses, one was a several-family dwelling. These 
properties, after being set in order, were profitably managed, and 
it would have been possible to pay a dividend, but it was decided 
that it was better business for the first year to establish a sur- 
plus with the proceeds. 

In May, 1897, eight small houses on Fairhill Street and one 
on Lombard were added to the Association's property. The 
Fairhill Street houses were in a colored neighborhood. In Febru- 
ary, 1899, seventeen houses on League Street came into the posses- 
sion of the Association. These houses needed and promptly 
received new plaster, new woodwork and paint. The Association 
had League Street put on the city plan, and obtained the intro- 
duction of an ordinance to secure proper drainage. As a result 
of its purchase a kindergarten was started, with an average 
attendance of thirty pupils, for the swarms of children in the 
neighborhood. It was conducted by the Social Science Depart- 
ment of the Civic Club, with which the name of Mrs. Edward 
Longstreth, a devoted servant of the public weal, will ever be 
associated. Fairhill Street was repaved in 1899, no doubt to 
keep pace with the new and progressive ownership of the eight 
houses, and the water supply was increased by new pipe lines. 
Ten houses of the Theodore Starr Estate — one a large dwelling 
with eight two-room apartments — were put under Association 
management in this year. 

Miss Parrish has made a study, "The Improvement of a 
Street," published as a tract by the Association, which describes 

3 



GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS 



the League Street development. League Street formerly bore 
the somewhat significant name of Reckless Street. It is between 
Front and Water Streets, and many of the men — largely Irish — 
are boatmen, fishermen on the Delaware, or longshoremen on 
the wharves. They have long slack seasons when they are exposed 
to the loafer's temptation of the gin-mill. I n this neighborhood 
the beautiful little Old Swedes' Church, built in 1900 on the site 
of an earlier block-house, is a landmark. In the green God's 
acre of the Episcopal sanctuary, with its quaint old parish 
buildings and the sexton's house, Alexander Wilson the famous 
ornithologist lies buried. 

But ancient history or present picturesqueness meant little 
to the brawling population outside the gate of the churchyard, 
where switching-engines chugged along the docks and factory 
chimneys clogged the air and iridescent surface drainage meandered 
from yard to yard and made alleys pestilential. Foul privy-wells 
undermined the yards and the foundations of the houses; the 
rafters had in many places rotted away; the cellars were reposi- 
tories of rubbish. 

There was fine raw material here among the boys and men 
for a hand of guidance and an inspiring personal presence — but 
most of it was very raw indeed. The drink wrought mischief 
among the womenfolk too; the children ran at large; the gangs 
of hoodlum boys played hide-and-seek with the policemen to 
steal lead pipe, to shatter windows, to break into the vacant 
houses and despoil them. Six of the houses taken by the Associa- 
tion were unoccupied. Each house was in a deplorable condition. 

The expenditure on these houses by the Association averaged 
$186. 

The brickwork had to be painted; plumbing, painting, car- 
pentering and plastering were necessary. At first the tenants 
were often unruly and irresponsible; fights were of frequent 
occurrence. Though the rents were low — $6.50 to $10.00 a month — 
the tenants often fell behind in payment, and there were many 
unprofitable " unlets." 

But with unwearied patience the Association strove to create 
among the people in its houses a sense of thrift, of honor, of self- 
respect, even of community spirit. It did not permit itself to 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 33 

be discouraged by backsliding or ungratefulness. It fought on 
for the sake of the regeneration not merely of seventeen houses 
but of a community, and in 1905 it was able to offer the remarkable 
result of $1432.00 paid in rents out of $1445.50 due, with a return 
of lYi per cent, on the investment, after paying to the Association 
a commission of the same percentage on the rents collected. 
A constant demand was created for the houses. The average 
period of occupancy of the present tenants is seven years and 
five months. The average net revenue has been nearly 6 per 
cent. The result is as forceful evidence as could be presented of 
the influence of the regular visits of the friendly rent collectors. 
The Southwark Settlement — a fine and flourishing organization 
doing a splendid work near by — grew out of a play-room and a 
Mother's Club of the Octavia Hill Association. In 1916 the 
Association bought, underdrained and repaired the five remaining 
houses of the street. 

But the Association did not confine its work within four walls. 
It took a bare, depressing, ash-heap area 20 by 80 feet, added 
to it the site of a house pulled down, and filled the vacancy — 
now known as the Hector Mcintosh Playground — with swings, 
games and a sandpile. An ice-water fountain was placed on the 
sidewalk. The women said that pitchers which once went out 
for beer came back after that filled with ice-water instead. 

One example of this kind is worth no end of homily. It is an 
epitome of the successful effort of the Association. 

From year to year the list of properties owned, or managed 
by agency, has lengthened. The Casa Ravello, owned by Dr. 
George Woodward and operated by the Association, was opened 
in 1903 for the special benefit of Italians. It stands at the corner 
of Seventh and Catharine Streets, and right on the corner, in a 
store-space that could be rented for $40 a month, is a most val- 
uable outpost of the Starr Centre Association which shows poor 
mothers what to do for their babies. In June, 1917, 219 different 
babies under two years of age were brought here for consultation. 
Nearly all were Italians. There were a few Jews and one colored 
child. " History cards" are kept, and the fluctuation of weight 
is traced by a graphic curve. There are home visits by nurses, 
and two doctors keep office hours. 



34 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

The Casa Ravello has four stories of brick, the windows made 
attractive by their gay boxes of geraniums, and air and light are 
at every window through the liberal space the courtyard leaves. 
The iron stairways come up through fire-towers, and there are 
netted verandahs safe and roomy for the youngsters of the family 
and the mothers resting or at work. On the roof in July and August 
is a playground, and a summer school for the children. Of these 
there are 79 in the building, and in midsummer, 1917, there was 
an average attendance of 45 in the school. They wear little red 
tags with their names, that the stranger may distinguish tiny 
black-eyed Domenico from the toddling frolicsome Bettina. 

The mothers use the roof too — for gossiping, embroidery, 
for hanging clothes, for the baby's nap in a preferred location 
of the hammock. There is a swing for larger children, and — 
safely shut away between-whiles in a cement-floored bin — there 
is a piano for the dance-lovers of Italy, great and small. All 
this for thirty-four families, at a rate which at its maximum is 
$14 for one of the three four-roomed apartments that boast a 
bath-tub. 

On September 22, 1903, Emily W. Dinwiddie, who had been 
a City Inspector of the Tenement House Department of New 
York, began an investigation in behalf of the Association and 
under its direction, — an investigation that lasted nearly a year. 
The cost was defrayed by special contributions. It resulted in 
a report which is in all ways a model for the emulation of others 
engaged in social research. The Bureau of Building Inspection 
and the Board of Health granted her every facility and permitted 
her freely to accompany their inspectors. Her report, entitled 
" Housing Conditions in Philadelphia," embraced the results 
of her thorough personal examination of 600 houses. For every 
dwelling-place investigated a card of minutely particularized 
details was filled out, of which facsimiles are presented, together 
with telling pictures, maps, and tables of simple and explicit 
arrangement giving according to nationality the statistics of 
every phase of the living conditions ascertained. 

Miss Hannah Fox was chairman of the directing and assisting 
committee of the Association; the other members were Dr. Frances 
C. Van Gasken, Helen L. Parrish, Robert P. Shick, Dr. George 




Italian Tenement Known as Casa Ravello. Thirty Apabtments of Two and Folk 
Rooms Each. First Floor Arranged for Stores. 



3o 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 37 



Woodward, E. Spencer Miller. Lawrence Veiller of New York, 
with his wide official experience of tenement problems, was of 
much assistance. 

The three areas studied were distributed and representative. 
One was the block between Eighth and Ninth Streets, Carpenter 
and Christian. A second was the segment of North American 
and of Newmarket Streets lying between Vine and Callowhill. 
The third took in the block bounded by Sixteenth, Eighteenth, 
Lombard and Rodman Streets. 

Here are some of the things Miss Dinwiddie found: — 
"One tenement visited was a three story house, without fire- 
escapes, containing a grocery store, a fish stand and a meat shop 
on the first floor. Above in the seventeen living rooms of all 
kinds — kitchens, bed-rooms and dining rooms — were eight fami- 
lies, consisting of thirty-three persons. A goat was kept in the 
room back of the grocery, and three dogs upstairs. 

"A row of houses faced on an alley whose width varied from 
three feet two inches to three feet eleven and a half inches. 

"Five houses on one court, of which four were occupied, had 
cellars flooded with sewage from a leaking soil pipe, the foul water 
standing about a foot deep in all but one of the buildings. . . 
Beds and bedding, said to have been cast aside because someone 
had died upon them, and it was 'bad luck' to use them again, 
were not infrequently found in cellars." 

In a certain alley "one hydrant was the only fixture for eleven 
families in, ten houses." A colored woman in one of the foul 
courts said: "I'm sorry to have you see my house lookin' dis way, 
lady, but 'tain' no use tryin' to be clean; we ain't got but one 
hydrant for dese yere five houses, an' we ain' had no water for 
a week, since de pump busted.'" 

Animals kept on the premises are a serious evil. In a tene- 
ment visited, "two rooms on the top floor were given up to the 
raising of fowls, and the floors and parts of the walls were covered 
with filth; in another house the door from the inside cellar stairs 
was pushed open during an inspection and a goat stalked in; 
in yet another, chickens were kept in a fenced-up corner of a 
third story room, used at the same time as a kitchen and a bed- 
room. Under a shop in one dwelling-house, white mice and rats. 



38 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

guinea pigs, rabbits, and dogs were kept for sale. At about the 
time of the festival of Yom Kippur, many yards and shed rooms 
in the Russian-Jewish neighborhoods were seen covered with 
blood and refuse of slaughtered fowls. The worst case found 
was that of a slaughter house and dwelling in one building. About 
thirty sheep were kept in the second story, which was reached 
by an inclined runway from the narrow side alley, giving entrance 
from the street to the rear of the house. Down stairs a room was 
used for slaughtering, and from 30 to 100 sheep were killed daily. 
The butcher and his family lived in the house, having a kitchen 
on the ground floor and attractively furnished rooms upstairs 
at the front. There were also dwellings adjoining on every side." 

Travellers in Tibet have described the ridges of filth that 
accumulate in the middle of village streets and freeze in winter. 
Tibet is on the other side of the world, and those whose com- 
placency is not to be disturbed like to believe that we have nothing 
so abhorrent here. But listen to Miss Dinwiddie. "The con- 
dition of the sidewalk varies with the seasons. In winter the 
alleys and parts of the sidewalk are often covered with frozen 
refuse of various kinds and ice from surface drainage. The writer 
has seen the occupants of an alley obliged, for several weeks, 
to climb over a hard frozen mass about two feet high, blocking 
up the entire outer end of the court. In summer, on the other 
hand, garbage accumulates rapidly, and the odors from the de- 
composition of such matter and from the pools of drainage water 
are offensive. As a visitor from l uptown' remarked while taking 
an alley picture, 'If one could photograph the smells, it might 
be possible to give an idea of this place.' " 

Among the heads of the 843 families, there was represented 
every occupation from that of card-sharp to that of minister or 
rabbi; in the social strata rag-pickers, scrub-women and organ- 
grinders were at the bottom, while opticians, pharmacists and 
machinists stood at the top. Of unskilled laborers the total 
number showed 39 per cent., and there was an equal proportion 
of skilled laborers. Commercial pursuits were represented by 
16 per cent., and the remaining 6 per cent, followed special occu- 
pations. The bankers, musicians, organ-grinders, street cleaners, 
candy makers and boot-blacks were in all cases Italians; of the 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 39 



37 fruit, candy and fish dealers and rag-pickers all but two were 
Italians. The worst instance of the sweating evil was found in 
an Italian tailor shop. Laundry work at home was confined to 
the colored district. Rag-picking (among Italians only), dress 
making, tailoring, cobbling, cigar making, fish cake making, 
herb brewing, plain sewing, scissors sharpening and umbrella 
mending were the other occupations carried on in living rooms. 
Fruit, vegetables and candy sold by trucksters were often stored 
in living-rooms over night. The fire risk does not need to be 
emphasized in the case of one house, occupied by two families, 
in which a marionette show took place nightly on the ground 
floor, where smoking was permitted. Fish stores, bakeries and 
dance halls were adjuncts of other crowded dwelling-places. 

The families living in apartments paid on the average $5.63 
a month for rent; those in one family dwellings paid $10.36 — 
almost twice as much. 

In her full and simple suggestions for remedial action, Miss 
Dinwiddie urged virtually the program of the Octavia Hill Asso- 
ciation. There should be strictly enforced regulations concerning 
congestion, water supply and toilet accommodations, air and light. 
Cellars and basements must not be used for sleeping purposes, 
nor should animals be kept and slaughtered on the premises. 
Ignorance and indifference on the part of landlord and tenant 
alike, the investigator held, is the great obstacle in the way of 
reform. The personal worker who will see clearly and report 
frankly and fearlessly is indispensable. Such workers, it is clear, 
are provided by the superintendence and the friendly rent- 
collection of the Octavia Hill Association. 

The fruit of Miss Dinwiddie's long and conscientious labor 
with the Committee's cooperation was a comprehensive legislative 
measure embodying the ten years' experience of the Association 
and dealing with the adaptation to the purposes of three or more 
families of houses originally built for one. An earlier law, of 
1895, made the building of tenement houses, as such, so costly 
that few since that time have been built for families of small 
incomes. Its present day application is almost wholly to the 
erection of high-class apartment houses. The new measure 
prepared and backed by the Association came before the legisla- 



GOOD HOUSING- THAT PAYS 



ture of 1905, and the selfish interests that would have suffered 
by its passage fought it tooth and nail. Undismayed, the Asso- 
ciation and its friends rallied and returned to the attack, and in 
1907, to their great satisfaction, it became a law. In the mean- 
time, in 1906, two ordinances were put before the city Councils 
by the Association through its Committee: one providing for 
underdrainage where a sewer connection was feasible; the other 
prescribing improved water facilities, for court and alley houses 
in particular. These ordinances did not pass, but in the agitation 
of the matters upon which they focussed the attention of the 
City Fathers and to some extent of the public at large, a useful 
educational result was reached, for models illustrating the con- 
ditions the Association sought to remedy were put on view at 
Horticultural Hall, meetings were held, and the councilmen 
were taken to see how the other half lived and to be impressed 
by the necessity for drastic changes. 

When in 1907 the act providing for the licensing and inspection 
of tenement houses was passed, the Director of Public Health 
and Charities asked the Association to help him frame the rules 
to govern the work of the new division of tenement house inspec- 
tion. The aid of the Association was given without stint, and 
upon the Committee's recommendation Miss Caroline Manning 
was appointed as the first inspector. 

It thus appears that the Association was prime mover in 
bringing the municipal administration to take action for the 
systematic examination and regulation of living conditions to 
ensure the health and comfort of the occupants of houses in 
hitherto neglected areas. Out of this instigation grew, as an 
arc of an ever-widening circle, the specialized activity of the 
Philadelphia Housing Commission, now known as the Housing 
Association. 

Delegates from forty social and philanthropic agencies met 
in the Mayor's reception room September 9, 1909, and organized 
the Commission. A particular function of the organization has 
been to obtain and enforce enlightened and equitable laws, and, 
with that end in view, to appraise the public of its effort and 
secure a distributive popular support. The Housing Association 
is performing a service of inestimable usefulness in its study of 



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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 43 

the direct relation between an evil domestic environment and 
the character and physical condition of those who are constantly 
exposed to it. It receives and acts upon thousands of complaints 
each year, and carries on extensive and intensive campaigns of 
public education by literature, illustrated lectures, and exhibits. 

Resuming our examination of typical properties in the care 
of the Octavia Hill Association, we find one of the most inspiring 
examples in the group of houses at Workman Place. 

This large and picturesque court is situated on Front street 
between Pemberton and Fitzwater. In Colonial days several 
of the houses belonged to the Mifflin family; later they became 
part of the Workman estate, and finally Mr. and Mrs. E. W. 
Clark acquired the group by instalments and turned it over to 
the Association to manage. 

There are twenty-two houses in all, built of red brick. Five 
of these face on Front Street, and these, with one on Pemberton 
Street, have several occupants each. Behind the Front Street 
dwellings, surrounding the ample open space of what was once 
a large garden, are the remaining houses, in groups, conveying 
a delightful impression of an island of peace and privacy in the 
midst of the sweltering sea of humanity in this loud and crowded 
foreign quarter. In the houses that face on Front Street there 
are wainscotted halls, carved balustrades and mantelpieces with 
elaborate designs of ships and grapes and fluting that bespeak 
the past glories of the more deliberate day of minuet and sedan- 
chair and the soft light of candles. Even the ancient window- 
pulleys were made of mahogany. One has only to read the 
itemized list of the household goods owned in 1754 by George 
Mifflin, Jr., as given in the Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, to 
realize the difference between that day and the present, wherein 
the Polish seamstress bends above her work in a room still haunted 
by the ancestral presences of those who were as deft in turning 
the heel of a stocking as in pouring tea. In the smaller houses 
there will be found Irish tenants who survive the Polish invasion 
of the neighborhood. 

On Pemberton Street there are two small vine-clad cottages 
with "G. M. 1748" set out in black bricks against the red, be- 
tokening George Mifflin's ownership. These houses were doubt- 



U GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

less occupied by his servants. They are not unlike the little 
"Letitia Cottage" of Penn in Fairmount Park. The Association 
set above windows and doorways slight projections that enhance 
the aspect. Betwixt these cottages an iron gateway admits to 
the large enclosure shaded by great trees, on which all the tiny 
gardens of the houses surrounding abut. The base of each tree 
is rimmed by a seat. There is abundant room for clothes-lines, 
not infringing on the space for the children's play. A pavilion 
is at one side. On the Fitzwater Street exposure is a temporary 
shelter to impound homeless animals till the S. P. C. A. wagon 
comes to claim them. 

At the corner of Front and Fitzwater Streets, through the 
generous initiative of a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Clark, is Work- 
man Place House, a Settlement of such demonstrated value to 
the region round about that it deserves more than passing mention. 

It is conducted by the Alpha Pi Fraternity of young women 
alumnae of the Agnes Irwin School. The Matron has taken 
hundreds of mothers and children of the neighborhood during 
the summer into the country, which is as novel and startling 
to many of these people as America was to the sailors of Columbus. 
The great fact of Fairmount Park itself is news to an incredible 
number. University of Pennsylvania students have taken the 
boys to summer camps. There has been supervised play in 
summer, and in the winter months there is a carefully scheduled 
and well-attended routine of classes and meetings for young and 
old. All these people have a racial affiliation with the dance, 
and even after the Mothers' meetings in the Good Neighbors' 
Club, dancing to the pianola is an exuberantly joyful exercise. 
Christmas parties are red-letter events. The entire admirable 
enterprise is sustained by bazaars, sales of old clothing, and gifts 
in cash and in kind. 

The little vegetable and flower gardens at the rear or in the 
forecourt of each of the Workman Place houses are sources of 
not inconsiderable pride to the occupants. Anyone who saw the 
central area before the Association took hold here must be amazed 
at the transformation. The solid board fences that dissected 
the space in all directions have been removed, the rubbish has 
been carted away, wells and cesspools have been filled, and the 




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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 51 

houses themselves — in a deplorably decrepit state — have been 
renovated from top to bottom. The generous owners have not 
sought an income from the property. Any returns have been 
left in the hands of the Association, as the contracting agency, 
for improvements or for the acquisition of other houses. 

A heartening example of the civic spirit generated in this 
region by the presence of this great object-lesson of Workman 
Place under the wise and watchful rule of the Association was 
the flag-raising that occurred in midsummer, 1917, on the Fitz- 
water Street side of the courtyard. Benjamin Barton, a resident 
of the block, went from house to house inducing his neighbors 
to scrub the steps and the cobbles till they shone with the lustrous- 
ness of Spotless Town; then they all, at his suggestion, hung out 
brave new flags, the eagles of Poland on their red and white 
field prominent among them. Little Maria Barton, dressed as 
the Goddess of Liberty, stood on the rear seat of the hard-working- 
Ford car belonging to the Association and released the Star- 
Spangled Banner over the street, midway of the block. Mr. 
Barton and others made speeches, and Fitzwater Street is still 
talking of its great day. 

The playground at Workman Place, the use of the roof of 
the Casa Ravello, the Hector Mcintosh Playground at Front 
and League Streets and playgrounds in Richmond and German- 
town in connection with properties about to be described, are 
noteworthy examples of the manner in which the Association 
is realizing Octavia Hill's own insistent prescription of open 
spaces. The Hector Mcintosh Playground, to which we have 
already referred, carries the name of the devoted second President 
of the Association. It dates from 1902, when two friends of the 
Association gave the land. Small as it is, even after the addition 
of the site of 957 South Front Street, it has played a most useful 
part in the lives of its patrons, young and old. Stockholders 
have generously subscribed funds for its maintenance, and during 
certain summers, in addition to the fun of the swings and games 
and sandpile, and the work of the morning kindergarten, there 
has been a series of seven or eight concerts of harp and violin 
costing a dollar apiece on the average, and bringing out a delighted 
throng to sing and to dance with the diminutive orchestra. 



52 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

The Board of Recreation and the Playground Association, always 
in sympathy with the objects of the Octavia Hill Association, 
have liberally cooperated in this work, in such ways as planting 
trees or providing a teacher. 

In January, 1911, the Association was requested by a physician 
to turn a noisome group of houses, breeding-places of pestilence 
and notorious hospital-feeders, on East Rittenhouse Street in 
Germantown, into something that would not be a standing rebuke 
to the community and the worst possible advertisement of the 
thriving and progressive suburb. After a meeting at the house 
of Mrs. Elizabeth Lean Head, residents of Germantown sub- 
scribed for stock in the Association to the amount of $20,825, on 
the understanding that the fund would be wholly devoted to 
the purpose specified. 

The Association thereupon acquired Nos. 523 and 531 to 551 
inclusive, with a total frontage of 210 feet on East Rittenhouse 
Street and a depth of 165 feet. The houses, near the Reading 
Railroad, were occupied by Italians. There were 25 houses, 
some of them run-down and filthy beyond the power of words 
to portray. There was no under drainage and two hydrants 
provided all the water there was. Externally there were gap- 
toothed sections of picket fence flat on the ground or sagging 
drunkenly; smashed boxes and wrecked barrels were the least 
repulsive feature of the promiscuous clutter under the heavy- 
laden clothes-lines. One building, a mere outhouse, rented for 
50 cents a month, and its wretched occupant had just been 
removed in a dying condition from tuberculosis. Within were the 
old, familiar features of ruin and decay and smells unholy. Three 
houses were at once torn down. Others were renovated from 
attic skylight to cellar floor, with the installation of modern 
toilet facilities; and two new brick buildings — two stories high, 
well lighted and well ventilated — were built with apartments 
for 14 families. The two-room apartments rent for $6.50 per 
month, and the four-room apartments for $11.00. In the entire 
operation there are quarters for 35 families, and at the rear is 
a large space available for a general playground and for tenants' 
gardens. There was much stone-work, and the difficult site 
necessitated a great deal of blasting in the solid rock. 




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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 59 

It has not been a triumphant progress from strength to strength 
with these Germantown houses and their untrained and ignorant 
Neapolitan and Sicilian occupants. Many of the men are un- 
skilled laborers for the city, content to earn a little and spend 
the money in long seasons of idleness. Two volunteer rent- 
collectors, speaking Italian, have been of great assistance, and 
the summer playground, a visiting nurse, and garden allotments 
have strengthened the hold of the Association upon the tenants. 

The transformation wrought by the summer of 1917 was 
truly wonderful. In place of the abomination of desolation 
described in the front yards of 1911, corn waved, and beanvines 
flourished. Besides the gardens thriftily cultivated by each 
householder where lettuce, celery and tomatoes grew in abundance, 
there was a large community garden with a square plot for each 
tenant, kept carefully weeded. From the windows giving upon 
the street the flag of Italy flew, and on the steps the mothers of 
little Italy sewed and gossiped and watched their bambini at 
play. In the pavilion of the ample central yard were happy 
families enjoying the shade, the children playing games, the 
babies napping in their tiny hammocks swung from the eaves. 
The whole offered as charming a picture of contentment in a 
congenial environment as one would care to see. 

A group of new houses in the district known as Richmond, 
an entire block of model dwellings for workingmen, represent 
a distinct departure from the policy to which the Association 
adhered for many years. But the enterprise, to which the Board 
gave most of its time and thought in 1914, recommended itself 
to the deliberate judgment of the members for two leading reasons 
— first, that it was becoming constantly harder to find old down- 
town houses for renovation which could be bought and altered 
at a cost permissive of a dividend, and, second, that the demand 
is waxing day by day for carefully designed and suitably equipped 
low-priced dwellings, since the operative builder is unaffected 
by philanthropy, and is building to sell or else to rent his houses 
for at least $15 a month. 

The Property Committee of the Board obtained an option 
on a tract in Richmond and was about to close the bargain when 
the rude hand of war, that has paralyzed so many efforts for the 



60 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

world's good, descended on the market and made it prudent to 
defer action until the spring of 1915. Then the more cheerful 
financial prospect seemed to justify a resumption of the task. 
A lot adjoining the one originally chosen, measuring 212 by 165 
feet and fronting on Cambria Street, was obtained. The total 
cost of the land and the dwellings that were put on it was $63,000. 

"The Philadelphia Model Homes Company" was created 
by the Board as a separate corporation to finance the under- 
taking, to own and operate the dwellings, and to continue its 
work in the future for any similar group it might be deemed wise 
to create if the first venture justified itself. 

The new corporation started with a nominal capital of $2,000. 
This sum was presently raised to $20,000; and the capital stock 
was entirely taken by the Octavia Hill Association, which named 
the directors and entered into absolute control. The rest of the 
cost of the operation — $43,500, or about two-thirds of the whole — 
was obtained by the sale of first mortgages, each secured on a 
particular lot and dwelling, and yielding 4.4 per cent, interest. 
The Finance Committee devised the scheme because, in the 
first place, it would limit the financial liability of the Association 
to the $20,000 of its actual investment, and in the second place 
the first mortgages at fixed interest on specific properties would 
more readily secure takers than dividends on the stock of the 
corporation. 

The block comprises sixteen one-family and sixteen two- 
family houses. Their appearance is very attractive. On the 
west and the north is a new, wide city playground, giving a clean 
sweep of sun and breeze. The houses surround on three sides 
a large gravelled central area which creates a private playground — 
an obvious advantage for the little ones who would be out of 
place in the big, public playground designed for older and more 
active children. At one end is a play pavilion, and the gardens 
with open fences reach to the playground at the rear of the houses. 
The central courtyard is entered by a driveway that permits 
of the collection of ashes and garbage without littering the side- 
walk in front of the houses. 

An easy question is, why couldn't these houses have front 
verandahs on both stories? The equally easy answer is that 







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64 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 65 

such verandahs add to the first cost and to the subsequent rental. 
There are balconies at the rear. 

Work was begun in the summer of 1915, and in December 
the houses were completed and occupied. The work was done 
under Mr. Feld's daily supervision, and done well, without a 
general contract. Thus a substantial saving was effected, and 
the construction is abreast of the standard set in work carried 
out on the usual plan. 

In each case a tenant was ready for the house when it was 
ready for him. The rental is $8.50 per month for an apartment 
of two rooms and bath, with a pantry having wash-tubs and a 
range in one of the rooms. Each of the two families in an apart- 
ment house has a partitioned share of the cellar. An apartment 
of two rooms, kitchen and bath is to be had for $10.50. The 
rental is $13.50 for the one-family houses, which give the tenant 
five rooms, with bath and furnace. There is at all times a waiting- 
list for these eminently delightful and desirable little homes close 
to a particularly busy center of diversified manufacturing enter- 
prise. 

At the end of the eleven months to November, 1916, the rent 
amounted to $5,517.65 out of a possible $5,676, — the difference 
being due to the fact that periods of occupancy did not precisely 
overlap. After deducting expenses and interest paid on mortgages 
the Model Homes Company was able to show a profit of $1,873.19; 
of this sum it set aside $400 for a depreciation account; and it 
paid to the Association $1,400, which was a seven per cent, return 
on the $20,000 invested by the Association. (See page 121.) 

A rebate of one-half of one month's rent was made to tenants 
who had lived in an apartment or a house a year and done no 
careless damage requiring repairs. Trees were planted in the 
yard and before the houses, and the occupants have always 
evinced a lively interest in their little garden-plots. The national- 
ity census is interesting. In the first year there were these families : 
Scotch, 3, German, 5, French, 2, Norwegian, 5, Swedish, 1, 
Italian, 1, American-born, 31 (18 of Irish extraction), — a total 
of 48. 

In 1914-15 the Association shared the gratitude of certain 
poor families which had no work in sight for the bread-winner, 



06 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

by arranging with the Emergency Aid Committee to supply the 
necessary materials and supervision if the Committee would 
provide the wages of laborers and mechanics engaged in repair 
work on the properties. Nine men began work on this basis in 
February, and fifty at one time were finally employed. The 
work was continued until July, when funds were no longer avail- 
able. In all, eighty men benefited by the arrangement: seventeen 
painters, eight carpenters, fifty-five laborers. From the Emer- 
gency Aid Committee $4,000 was received, and was disbursed 
for wages, tools, car-fare and incidental expenses. Two hundred 
houses were completely put in order and painted, yards were 
repaved, fences were rebuilt, grading was done, and a vacant 
area was prepared for gardening purposes. Moreover, men who 
knew nothing of plastering or cement work learned how to do 
it, and thus acquired a new accomplishment of market value. 
They put down floors, relaid walks, whitewashed cellars, and 
concreted walls where dampness had exuded. Some of these 
men who came as utterly green hands still remain in the employ 
of the Association. 

In 1916 the Whittier Centre, with whose purposes the Asso- 
ciation is wholly in sympathy, carried out a plan for improved 
housing facilities for the negro population. The Centre is organ- 
ized for the study of this problem, and for practical measures 
devised as the outcome thereof. It formed the Whittier Centre 
Housing Company, with a capital of $25,000, which took title 
to property at Dickinson and Opal Streets. The planning and 
construction of the first group of houses was put in the hands 
of the Association, and Mr. Feld supervised the building of seven 
two-family dwellings with apartments of three rooms and bath, 
at a rental of $3.00 and $3.50 a week. As an indication of the 
lively demand for such cleanly and attractive quarters, it should 
be noted that there were two hundred applications for the fourteen 
apartments available. 

That this enterprise pays is shown by the fact that in mid- 
summer of 1917 a dividend of 5 per cent, was paid. 

As for houses for negro tenants owned by the Association, 
an interesting group will be found along Naudain Street between 
Seventh and Eighth, and in the vicinity. Here simple rooms 




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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 



may be had for a couple at the low figure of 80 cents a week, or 
$1.00 for larger rooms. The standard of self-respect and cleanli- 
ness among the tenants is high. Many of the houses were formerly 
dens of the lowest order, and the Association does not relax its 
vigil to prevent a recurrence to former conditions. In all there 
were, in 1917, 125 colored families in houses owned or controlled 
by the Association. It is probable that in the near future the 
Association will take over other properties west of Broad Street 
and south of Lombard in the district into which negroes are 
moving. The Association is hopeful of doing much more in the 
future to help the negroes find good homes. 

The number of houses owned by the Association at the be- 
ginning of 1917 was 179; the number of families in these houses 
was 244. The agency properties in charge of the Association 
numbered 224, and there were 460 families housed in them. This 
gives a total of 704 families in 403 dwellings. 

Agency properties have been handled by the Association, 
to the expressed satisfaction of owners, since it was in the second 
year of its existence. 

The Association charges lYi per cent, for its management; 
a charge fully justified by the quantity and the quality of its 
executive supervision. 

The properties handled for others may be thus classified: 
first, houses received from owners who built with an intent frank- 
ly philanthropic, and who realized that the Association was 
qualified by experience to run these properties to the greater 
advantage of owner and tenant; second, houses bought at the 
suggestion of the Association and left in its hands for reconstruc- 
tion and management; third, houses held as ordinary business 
investments, and committed to the oversight of the Association 
for the sake of an assured lucrative result; fourth, houses received 
from trust companies or estates; fifth, houses turned over by 
charitable or philanthropic institutions which have received 
them as bequests. 

In the last connection, it is to be observed that the legacy 
is made to perform a twofold service. Low-wage families arc 
assured a good home at a small cost; and the legatee receives a 
return which may be put to philanthropic uses. Of course 1 in 



72 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

some cases there is so much to be done to rehabilitate the property 
bequeathed that for a time there is no income from it. But the 
possible dual objective of a legacy is worth the thoughtful con- 
sideration of those who would have a bequest mean as much as 
possible to those who come after them. 

It is seen from this brief review of the impersonal side of the 
business operations of the Association that in certain particulars 
the procedure of Miss Hill has been modified. Miss Hill relied 
largely on volunteer collectors. The Association in addition 
to its unpaid collectors employs several who are paid. Miss 
Hill obtained purchasers for houses which she desired to improve. 
The Association, as a stock company, has purchased outright 
a number of houses. It has realized that whereas certain land- 
lords on a grand scale in London controlled vast areas, in Phila- 
delphia, aside from the Girard Estate, with its admirable model 
homes for persons who can afford them, there are very few owners 
of large, undivided tracts where blocks of model houses might 
be created. So it has been accustomed to purchase its groups 
piecemeal from a number of owners. 

It is probable that in the future the Association will undertake 
to an increasing extent the construction of new dwellings. For 
a long time to come, if not always, it will continue to renovate 
old dwellings, for the old dwellings, situated in the congested 
areas, are the abodes of most of the poor, who are traditionally 
averse to uprooting; and often the poor feel much more at home 
in an old house " fixed up" than in a new house to which the 
adjustment only comes by the slow stages of a social education. 
Of course a point is reached, especially on a soaring market for 
all building materials, when it pays better to build anew than 
to make over the old. The philanthropic side of the Association's 
endeavor will cling to the old houses. The sheer business astute- 
ness of the enterprise will erect new dwellings. The problem is 
to keep the due proportion between the business and the philan- 
thropy. 

The tenants of the Association are not allowed to sublet or 
to take in lodgers without explicit authorization. That this 
regulation is sensible is obvious. Any other course would lead 
to all the evils of overcrowding and of positive immorality which 



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74 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

the organization was created in large part to fight. The housing 
of the single man is not attempted. The Association is aware 
of the importance of the bachelor's problem. It is a matter that 
the munition-factories and other industrial plants in quest of 
shelter for their employes are daily called upon to consider. 
Were its means and its executive facilities less limited, there is 
no doubt that the Association would grapple as courageously 
and as successfully with this issue of the housing of the single man 
as with the problem of the housing of families. 

Charles H. Ludington, President of the Association, says in 
his report for the year 1916: "It is also the desire of the Board 
to give as much publicity as possible to the special lines of service 
which the Association is now prepared and equipped to offer— 

(1) Advice with regard to the restoration to approved standards, 
and the altering for profitable use of old or unsanitary dwellings. 

(2) Undertaking, after submitting estimates, the entire carrying 
out of such improvements and the future supervision and manage- 
ment of the property for the owners if desired. (3) The manage- 
ment of residential properties held by institutions or corporations, 
insuring for them the maintenance of sanitary and proper con- 
ditions, together with the social service offered to the tenants 
by the Association through rent collectors trained in our methods. 
We have frequently been able to render valuable assistance of 
this kind both to individual owners and to institutions owning 
real estate of this character, which, through neglect or merely 
formal management, has deteriorated. Instances have been 
brought to our attention where, entirely without the knowledge 
of the owners, conditions have existed not merely unsanitary 
but also otherwise highly objectionable and which would have 
subjected the owners to just criticism. This the standards of 
management of our Association will absolutely prevent. (4) 
Industrial housing by employers for their employees. The interest 
in this subject is showing marked increase, and the Association 
is ready to place its experience and facilities at the disposal of 
corporations or firms considering the matter, and to prepare 
plans, procure estimates and supervise construction, and if desired 
to undertake the management of such properties in and about 
Philadelphia. (5) Improved housing for wage earners. The 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 75 

experience and information which the Association has gathered, 
especially in recent years, qualifies it in the judgment of the 
Board in tendering its services as an expert to anyone who may 
be ready to consider this character of investment. There is 
unquestionably in our judgment a need in Philadelphia for new 
building of this kind, i. e., for dwellings that will rent for under 
$15.00 per month. The operating builder is supplying only 
houses of a more expensive grade and for quick sale, because 
there is more profit in this for him. That sanitary, durable and 
comfortable dwellings can be built for rental at less than $15.00 
per month, and made to yield under proper management a return 
of 5 per cent, has been repeatedly demonstrated in this and other 
cities. To any interest that is willing to consider such investment 
with the further view of meeting a community need, we should 
offer our services. From our own actual experience in this field 
and our knowledge of similar undertakings elsewhere, our organi- 
zation can, we believe, render valuable help in the planning and 
execution of such projects." 



IV 
DAYS AFIELD 

TO read of the work of the "friendly rent-collector" in cold 
print is one thing; to feel the pulse of it by personal 
contact is another matter. 

Dr. E. R. L. Gould, in a report that he made to the Com- 
missioner of Labor in 1895 on "The Housing of the Working 
People/ 7 described at length Miss Hill's system of rent-collecting, 
which made the process so much more than a soulless, impersonal 
proceeding. 

He said, "There are abundant testimonies to the efficiency 
of rent-collecting as practised by Miss Hill. Her system has 
been adapted with uniform success in many large cities in Europe 
and to a smaller extent in this country . . . The moral influ- 
ence of Miss Hill's system has been to admit women to a greater 
extent into the management of housing companies, a practice 
which has undoubted advantages. Several of the large London 
dwelling companies acknowledge that their success, financially 
and morally, only began with the introduction of rent-collecting 
through lady volunteers." 

A bad tenant is not turned into a good one merely by a periodic 
demand for money. If all tenants were always in comfortable 
circumstances, if they never suffered from lack of employment, 
if protracted illness disabling the bread-winner of the family 
never spelt acute privation for the rest, if every poor and ignorant 
foreigner understood from the first his relation to the community 
and to society at large, and scrupulously maintained this relation 
for his part, the "friendly rent-collector" might be superfluous. 
But as conditions stand, the very soul of the Octavia Hill system 
is this personal contact which has the business transaction for 
its immediate warrant; and by the acid test of business results 
its efficacy is demonstrated. 

In the great majority of cases the rent-collector does not 
have to ask a leading question: the tenants are ready enough 
to flock round her and pour their woes into her ear. Her appear- 

77 



78 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

ancejis often the signal for a fusillade of questions, petitions, 
complaints. 

"Am I going to get that paint for my stairway, please ma'am? " 
"The rain last week leaked into the cellar something terrible." 
"The water in the backyard won't drain off. The bricks around 
the hydrant has all sunk down." "It's been four days since the 
man was here to take away the garbage." "The neighbors keeps 
puttin' ashes in the garbage can, and garbage with the ashes. 
Sure I dunno who's been doin' it." 

Such are the petty complaints that all the rent-collectors hear 
on all their rounds. These matters might be considered to be 
wholly within the domain of the superintendent and his mechanics. 
But the tenants do not differentiate. Their appeal is to anyone 
who may be supposed to be connected with the Association. 
Sometimes they ask modestly, meekly. Sometimes they ask 
in accents of more or less defiant challenge. Miss Hill herself 
describes how she was locked into a room by an irate woman 
who said she wouldn't pay the rent till the mantel was repaired, 
in a house so recently taken over by the new landlady that there 
had not been an opportunity to attend to the matter. 

The friendly rent-collector bides her time, keeps her tongue 
behind her teeth, and makes allowances for the previous con- 
dition of servitude to low ideals and to grasping landlords,which 
has been that of many of her charges. 

The real reward of the work to the right sort of worker is in 
this lively, daily chance to meet the people and to help them 
in their problems by the service that is better than the outright 
gift of money. 

Here, for a trivial instance, we come to a humble door where 
the rent is due, and a poor man has great boxes of laces which 
he means to move upstairs and store where he lives. There is 
really no space for the stuff in the one room that he shares with 
wife and baby. He plans to sell his wares from his cart beside the 
curbstone on the morrow. The boxes are nearly as big as an 
upright piano. He cannot afford another place for storage. That 
is his problem. To you and to me, living in a whole house, the 
advent of such boxes would be nothing to worry about. But if 
this vendor can't secure from the friendly rent-collector a sus- 




70 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 81 

pension of the unwritten rule against overcrowding his small 
space, he is in a grievous predicament. 

A few minutes later we find a whole court in an uproar over 
an incident that would mean little to those of us who have gardens 
of size and gardeners of skill. One of the fathers living in the 
court — a one-armed man — has spent a blistering Sunday after- 
noon inducing morning-glories to cling to the strings he has put 
up against the high board fence. The little plot of ground on 
which his plants grew was perhaps thirty feet long, and a foot 
and a half wide. He took pride in the result, and his neighbors 
praised it. When his back was turned a little Polish child of two, 
living next door, came trotting along, pulled down the wire 
netting he had arranged in front, and tore off the vines that he 
had laboriously twisted round the strings. 

The indignant neighbors insist, in conclave, that the mother 
stood in the doorway laughing while the child wrought this mis- 
chief. To the friendly rent-collector the mother, with small 
English but with a profusion of gesture, explains her injured 
innocence. After long and excited parley, in which everyone 
who is at home in the court takes part, peace is restored, and the 
tactful mediator leaves behind her smiles and good humor in 
place of sullen resentment. 

In this case the chief complaint the neighbors brought was 
that the mother — who was supposed to know so little of our 
tongue — had used such awful language! 

"I didn't use to be a good woman myself," said another mother 
in this court. "My mother didn't use to be a good woman, 
either. But now my daughter's comin' on, and I want her to 
be different. I want her to be a Christian. She sings hymns 
somethin' lovely." 

In an Italian yard near-by are old railway-ties high piled, 
to be chopped into kindling. In their enthusiasm for saving 
money, the householders are likely to fill the court as high as 
the roofs with the beams, if not restrained by the rent-collector's 
timely warning that they must leave some room for other pur- 
poses. 

One of the houses shows menacing patches of brown specks 
on the plastering of a tiny bedroom — that means the larvae of 



82 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

vermin. In a hole in the midst of each patch are the live insects. 
The friendly rent-collector makes a careful note of the fact. 
There is an evil day in store for this common pest of the tenants 
in old houses, when the Association shall bring its batteries of 
formidable disinfectants to bear. The Association is not fond 
of spreading wall-paper over the surfaces where insects live and 
thrive. 

Here is a young man with a moral inheritance that the friendly 
rent-collector knows by heart. He has a job slicing bacon with 
a meat-packing concern. Today is a holiday, he explains. Query: 
will he hold down the job, or go on drifting? The fever of the 
wandering ne'er-do-weel burns in his veins. His father is a dip- 
somaniac, who runs amuck periodically with a carving-knife and 
finds his foes in his own household. He once killed a man and 
escaped to an adjoining State. Detectives caught him and he 
was lodged in the "Pen." He blamed his wife for it, and sent 
her letters demanding $80 for a shyster lawyer to get him out. 
He sent her pictures of caskets, as portents of her fate when he 
should finally emerge from durance vile. 

At last she raised the money and got him out. He wept on 
the doorstep — the neighbors, whose heads were at all the windows, 
said he shed buckets — and she took pity on him and abandoned 
her design of procuring a separation. He has been home for a 
few days, and on this particular day husband and wife are off 
on a picnic together. The son knows all the story. How long 
is the peace to last? Will the boy in time follow in the erratic 
footsteps of the father? 

Here is another sinister family history that faces the visitor. 
The mother is feeble-minded. There are five children. Two of 
the boys and two of the girls inherit the maternal defect. The 
other child, a girl, is normal. The father works by fits and starts. 
A former source of income to the family was a woman boarder 
of bad character. The Society for Organizing Charity and the 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children have interested 
themselves in these derelicts, and the Octavia Hill Association 
is trying to help. 

Another kind of trouble constantly cropping up is that of 
the victims of rascally insurance-agents. They turned over their 



THE 0CTAY1A HILL ASSOCIATION 83 

books to the agents to keep. The agents took the money and 
either did not enter the sums or recorded them incorrectly. In 
some cases those who expected an old-age pension or at least 
their burial expenses will not get a cent. 

"But," someone may ask, "what has this humanitarian effort 
to do with rents and dividends? Couldn't the money be obtained 
and no questions asked, no advice given, no 'hard-luck stories' 
heard? Business is business. Let the charitable societies, the 
soup kitchens, the Salvation Army or what you will, look out for 
the other side of the matter." 

The answer to this contention is that a conscientious landlord 
can hardly be satisfied to accept money from any sort of house 
without knowing or caring how it is obtained. Several times 
in the experience of the Association the owners of houses which 
had descended to base uses were shocked and grieved inexpressibly 
to learn of it. In one instance a good lady residing in England 
who had never seen the property managed by her agents in Phila- 
delphia couldn't believe the tales that were told her concerning 
its condition. The agents themselves were unaware of the facts 
until the Association reported to them the lively horrors. Owner 
and agents alike were glad to have the houses pass into the control 
of the Association, which at once converted them into dwellings 
which no longer were a blot on the 'scutcheon of the City of 
Homes. 

The question of repairs, when the tenants make their requests 
or the rent-collector's inspection discovers places where they 
may be needed, is a matter determined by urgency, by the amount 
of money already expended on the property, and by the evinced 
cooperative spirit of the tenant. It stands to reason that slovenly 
and destructive occupants are not accorded the same attention 
that is given to the representatives of those who are clean and 
careful and prompt in their payments. What a difference there 
may be on opposite sides of a thin partition-wall! On this side 
of the wall is a family inclined to dirt and disorder, because of 
its unperfected social education. On the other side of the wall, 
only a few inches away, the floor, neatly carpeted, is spotless. 
The center-table holds a gaudy lamp, or a vase of dried grasses, 
or lurid paper flowers. There are pictures on the walls, of saints 



84 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

or landscapes or the family, in crayon, — perhaps the bridal 
couple arm-in-arm, or the head of the house in the gorgeous uni- 
form of a Polish benefit association. 

One may find the bureau turned into a shrine, with a crucifix 
and candles; or perhaps the royal family of Italy is a prized 
possession in a glorious namboyancy of colors. 

The rent-collector refers all important questions of improve- 
ments to the superintendent for his decision. Part of her special 
care it is to see that the plumbing is in good order. The Octavia 
Hill Association is largely responsible for the considerable reduc- 
tion of the number of cases in which six or eight or a dozen families 
in a court live off the same hydrant. In one court visited, a pet 
dog had been giving considerable trouble, since he had learned to 
turn on the water himself, and would leave it running. 

Garbage and ashes come under the rent-collector's super- 
vision, too. When the former is thrown where the latter should 
be, it becomes necessary to inquire more particularly who had 
watermelon for dinner, who had chicken, and who had corn- 
ears — perhaps at a dollar a dozen. In one case where an orthodox 
Jewish family was blamed by neighbors, the supposed culprits 
were exonerated by the discovery of a ham-bone in the can when 
the lid was lifted. 

Just as the work of a Red Cross nurse in a war-hospital is a 
different matter from a debutante's dream of it, so the inspection 
by the rent-collector may become a very plain and prosaic, un- 
decorative business indeed. She has to see, to think, to know. 
Nothing is too small for her attention. 

The "Conditions of Tenancy" printed in the monthly rent 
book which the collector carries for receipts, gives the rules she 
must enforce. All rents must be paid promptly in advance. 
The tenant will be required to pay for any damage due to his or 
her own carelessness. The tenant must replace glass broken 
in the windows, if it is the tenant's fault. Lodgers must not be 
taken nor rooms sublet without the collector's written permission. 
Cellars and yards are to be kept free from rubbish, and no animals 
are allowed in the premises. Garbage and ashes must be kept 
separate, and rubbish and paper must have their own receptacles. 
Tenants must keep the sidewalk clean and free from obstruction, 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 



and must attend to the removal of ice and snow. Nails or hooks 
must not be driven in the woodwork without permission, and 
nothing is to be built in the yard. Each tenant is responsible 
for a set of keys, which must be surrendered upon vacating. In 
tenement houses each tenant must do his or her share in cleaning 
halls, stairs and yards. 

There are also explicit suggestions for the care of bathrooms, 
kitchens, plumbing and garbage cans. There is a brief direction 
printed on the inside of the cover for the collector's ready reference, 
giving the addresses and the office-hours of various dispensaries, 
hospitals and other institutions which may be a present help in 
time of need to the tenants. 

A colored woman on her knees scrubbing a floor that already 
seemed clean, explained that one couldn't be too "pertickler 
about them germs." The germs, she explained, were so small 
you couldn't see them, but they certainly could raise a dreadful 
rumpus inside a person or a home. She did not know of Metchni- 
koff or Pasteur or Lister, but she grasped the important idea. 

A janitor for a house or a group of houses may be appointed 
by the Association from among the tenants, at a nominal fee — 
taking the form, perhaps, of a dollar a month subtracted from 
the rent. The janitor takes charge of the garbage and the ash- 
cans, and cleans out the houses that are to be rented. She sees 
to it that the tenants sweep their rooms and hallways and stairs, 
each doing a part of the premises used in common. The janitor 
is encouraged to consider herself a working partner of the Associa- 
tion, and she is usually proud of her post. 

An important part of the collector's duty is to ascertain and 
report damage done to plumbing. The plumber also notifies 
the Association of any damage that is to be traced to the tenant, 
and the latter defrays part of the cost of repairs by instalments 
till the whole amount has been paid. 

Careful calculation showed that in a group of 140 families, 
for one year, the cost of repairs for plumbing due to the tenants' 
carelessness was $32. The real estate officer of a large trust 
company declared this an excellent record. 

As the rent-collector of tact and insight makes her rounds 
the mechanical transaction of requesting and receipting for the 



86 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

rent is accomplished frictionlessly and with dispatch in the great 
majority of instances. The services of the constable, at a cost 
of $2.00, to dispossess a family are rarely and very regretfully 
called into requisition. But the Association stands for no shilly- 
shallying. It requires prompt payment. It insists that those 
who occupy its houses shall fulfil the few simple regulations it 
has established. It does not hesitate to invoke the arm of the 
law when the need arises, and the tenants soon become aware 
of the fact. Most of them, happy to be under a fair and consider- 
ate landlord, are punctual, peaceful and contented. "I'll never 
get another landlord like you," said an old Jew, compelled for 
reasons of his own to move, as he trudged dolefully away wagging 
his beard. 

The cases in which the Association has to proceed to the 
extreme penalty of eviction may be similar to that of the woman 
who represented herself as a widow with four children. The 
children were mythical. She took in four male boarders, in 
flagrant defiance of the strict rule that forbids taking boarders 
or subletting without the Association's consent. There was 
nothing to do but to put her out, inexorably. 

The rent-collector takes with her wherever she goes her money- 
bag, containing a small card-catalogue to check off payments, 
which are entered in the office ledgers, receipt-books, blank 
forms for leases, and paper for memoranda. Sometimes tenants 
who fail to have the sum ready when the call is made promise 
to bring it to the office, and rarely do they fail to keep their word. 
Italians are particularly punctilious in their payments. The man 
who after an absence of two months came back and paid up for 
the whole time, though there were a few days he was not bound 
to pay for, saying proudly, "I am an honorable gentleman," was 
merely typical of his compatriots. 

Ordinarily it is not the great crises of life and death that 
confront the sympathetic rent-collector. But she never can tell 
what will meet her round the corner. Here sits a man who was 
for years a baker, and he is utterly forlorn. His sister bustles 
cheerfully about the room, making as brave a pretence of keeping 
a home as she can with some sorry sticks of furniture and a few 
cracked dishes. The ailing brother has just come back from the 




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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 91 

hospital, and there is a package wrapped in a bit of Polish news- 
paper on the table before him. The rent-collector unwraps from 
it a brown bottle of medicine bearing the label of the Polish 
doctor to whom he had gone straight from the contrary hospital 
advice, to secure a nostrum for his heart-trouble. He insists 
that he never will return to that hospital which kept him in bed 
so long and did nothing for him. He will never be able to work 
again, he reiterates monotonously. 

Those who have labored in France among soldiers blinded 
in war, to restore a hopeful mood in which a man takes hold on 
life again, know what means a wise, kind woman will use with 
a discouraged man who finds his cross too heavy to carry and 
has succumbed to a melancholy listlessness. She brings him 
round by degrees to a more rational frame of mind, and in place 
of the closed door she shows him an open window. Was not the 
result worth tarrying for, a few minutes? Even from the com- 
mercial point of view is anything gained by having tenants who 
are at odds with destiny, or anaemic, if not acutely ill, from bad 
air, bad smells, foul vaults and cellars, surface drainage and 
contaminated food? Was not Miss Hill entirely right when she 
declared that tenants and their surroundings must be improved 
together? 

Here was another trouble to be adjusted by the patient 
universal arbiter. Italian children sat on Polish steps and refused 
to be dislodged. Out of a cloud no bigger than a child's uplifted 
hand came a storm that threatened to destroy the peace of the 
street. Five nations presently swept into the melee. No great 
matter, you say — but even so the world-war started. 

Wagon drivers for the meat packers' distributing houses 
struck for a dollar a week more. A little butcher couldn't afford 
to let his chopping block stay idle. He borrowed a push-cart and 
a neighbor helped him and he fetched the meat himself, running 
the gauntlet of the angry teamsters. But that is the reason, if 
you please, that he hasn't the rent today. There is so often the 
slenderest margin between a sufficiency and dire distress in the 
case of the poor. To most of us a strike is in the newspapers. 
To them a strike is in their lives — it may come like a bolt of 
lightning crashing through the roof to disrupt a home. 



92 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

Perhaps the reckless joy-rider or motor-truck driver will 
never know how many little children are kept within doors by 
their mothers for fear they will be run over if they play in the 
street. But the rent-collector knows. There are so many children 
shrieking and sprawling over the cobbles already that it doesn't 
seem as though there could be any left in any of the houses. But 
there are always plenty more. Here are some, too tiny to be 
allowed to go to the city swimming-baths. In the heat of summer 
they wear scarcely any clothes, and their puny limbs stick out 
from their tattered garments like twigs from a bird's nest. They 
sit here in the darkened room where their mother is sewing on 
trousers which she " finishes" at nine cents a pair. The mother 
explains that she doesn't dare let them go out into the street — 
they might get run over. So here they sit, listless, pale, forlorn. 
They laugh outright when you play a child's game on your fingers 
for them, and are loath to have you go. 

In another house sits a fair-haired girl with blue eyes, one of 
them sadly atwist, and a scrofulous disfigurement marking what 
is almost a pretty face. She. is perhaps fourteen years old. You 
start to talk to her and you find she is deaf and dumb. She has 
been at a school for such unfortunates, the rent-collector explains, 
and this is her summer vacation. It is certainly vacant enough. 

Here are houses just about to be transferred to the Associa- 
tion. Italians, mostly, occupy them. Notice the English sparrow 
that flutters into a crevice of the bricks, where it wholly dis- 
appears as it finds its nest. There is the common phenomenon 
of one hydrant outside, for half-a-dozen families. In a dark 
angle of a yard, behind a woodshed cluttered and foul, there is 
a pool of stinking black water out of which you can fish rotten 
burlap and odds and ends of the social history of all the houses. 
The curious children have turned pale green, like sprouts in a 
cellar, and their arms are thin as pipestems. The stench that 
emanates from the pool seems to have something to do with it. 
The mother says — somewhat proudly — that a doctor has said 
that her children have sluggish livers. She looks at you with a 
furrowed brow as she wipes her hands in her apron. She is won- 
dering whether there is any hope of anything better in the way 
you are looking at her. "The landlord," she says, not knowing 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 93 

of the change to another regime that is imminent, " never does 
nothin' to the place but just collect the rent." 

A few years ago behind the rear wall of a large church there 
was a pocket that those who praised God on the other side of the 
wall knew nothing about. It adjoined a court of nine houses 
which the Octavia Hill Association had acquired and improved. 
Through the court the inmates of the four evil and invisible 
dwellings made their hasty escape to the street when the law 
was on the trail that the gospel never found. The owner was 
a well-to-do negro, who was content to take his money from an 
agent and ask no questions. The agent was appealed to, again 
and again, to put an end to the bedlam of drink and gambling, 
of fighting and obscenity that made night hideous on the premises. 
Providentially the owner died and the houses were bought by 
a friend of the Association who turned them over to its care. 
There was nothing to do but to evict the tenants. Polish im- 
migrants of the poorest were put in. In the first year after the 
change the rent-collector was able to show every cent collected. 
In the second year the result was the same. In the meantime 
the Association received its usual lYi per cent, commission for 
collecting the rents and the owners received in the first year 6.4 
per cent, and in the second year 6.5 per cent, on the investment. 

Another striking object-lesson among many that might be 
cited as to the value of the quiet influence of the rent-collector 
— an influence that permeates as subtly as yeast — is to be seen 
in the group of houses for the negro population on Naudain 
Street near the offices of the Association, to which reference has 
already been made. One of these houses, since it is given over 
to single old women, has come to be called the "Old Ladies' 
Home." Would one find exemplary contentment let him talk 
with an old crippled, blind woman who lives on the top floor. 
"She is able to iron a shirt-waist without a wrinkle," says the 
friendly rent-collector. The order and the cleanliness of these 
rooms is remarkable. There are stories of the plantation-life 
to be heard at the lips of the old-time "Mammy" of Dixieland. 
There are the manners of the great houses that have become 
historic landmarks, and of the days before "Uncle Tom's Cabin" 
was written. The whole House of Bishops of the A. M. E. Church 



94 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

has to find room on the walls somewhere, and you will discover 
that devout communicants are on their knees every night for 
the younger generation who may fall a prey to the lures of the 
Devil along the Great Black Way of South Street. 

As for the all-important role of the Superintendent, it is hard 
to see where his work begins or ends. There are just as many 
troubles as he will give ear to. Here is a Jewish woman who 
turns loose a flood of appeal and interrogation and never stops, 
when either the rent-collector or the superintendent comes in 
sight. All she wants is all there is to want; only a "blue sky" 
concession would satisfy her claims. But behind all this impor- 
tunity is maternal ambition. A piano in the house, and the 
daughter's lessons, mean stinting for all the rest, as in the case 
of a home — not controlled by the Association — where a druggist's 
clerk lives and we find the kitchen range, the dinner-table and 
a Steinway baby-grand crowded together in one small room. 

The Association has its own force of mechanics, for work old 
and new, and the superintendent is their "boss." They have a 
repair shop in the basement of the office at 613-15 Lombard 
Street for any work that is not to be done on the premises. There 
they keep supplies of small hardware, paint and lumber to be 
used as the call comes. 

These mechanics attend to everything except the plumbing, 
the roof -repairs, and the larger operations that involve consider- 
able plastering and brickwork. The plumbing is always as simple 
as it can be, and when it is once installed the maintenance chiefly 
means keeping the drains to the sinks and toilets in working 
order. 

When houses are taken over for alteration, galvanized sinks 
with slate backs are put in, except that in the better houses one- 
piece enameled iron sinks are used. The water supply, run 
through galvanized pipe, issues at brass spigots. Not much 
lead pipe is used — it is tempting to thieves. The sink taps are 
iron. 

One of the first things to do to an old house toward its rehabili- 
tation is to scrape off the paper. The Association has no love 
of many thicknesses of paper concealing long neglect and the 
insidious lairs of insects, and it generally applies paint or calci- 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 95 

mine instead. Ten or twelve coats of paper are common, and 
as many as twenty-seven have been removed from the walls of 
one room. When the walls are scraped the breaks in the plaster 
are likely to be alive with the vermin. The walls are painted 
or calcimined in light tones that make an agreeable contrast 
with the woodwork. Many tenants want paper, but they can 
be taught in time the sanitary advantage of the alternative. 

The exterior brickwork, frequently buckling and crumbling, 
requires much attention, and often many feet of new wall must 
be built, or a wall entirely replaced. Broken doors and rotting 
window-frames and sashes are frequent items of expense. It is 
a mistake to renew glass in a sash too weak to hold it. A new 
sash is a truer economy in the long run than one that is patched 
up "to do." 

It might look as though in the case of a wrecked window- 
blind (usually blinds are not found on Association houses) or a 
worn-out washer for a spigot the tenant might display sufficient 
initiative to attend to the necessary repairs himself; but there 
are so many ways of doing things wrong and of damaging Asso- 
ciation property that the Superintendent actually prefers to 
have the tenants let things alone till he and his own men can come. 

A three-story house at 1326 Kenilworth Street might be 
chosen as an apt example of the superintendent's reconstructive 
work. The rental of the house before the Association took charge 
was $16 a month. It was sublet to negro tenants who paid in 
all about $50 a month for their quarters. 

It is now being rearranged for two-room apartments, one on 
each floor, which will rent for eight dollars a floor per month, 
the rent payable in weekly instalments. There is a toilet on 
each floor, and there is a sink in each kitchen. Superfluous parti- 
tions that prevented the free circulation of light and air have 
been taken out. A gesture of the superintendent's arms, as 
though he were lashing out in a gymnastic exercise, told one 
more than his words. "I must get light and air," he said; and 
one thought of Octavia Hill's insistence on this point. 

One of a row of little houses in the rear is $8 a month. The 
former owner put in a few cheap articles of furniture and col- 
lected $20 a month. Under the Association the furniture is that 



96 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

of the tenants. Improvements now being installed will add a 
dollar a month to the rent. These little houses are called "one, 
two, three houses/' because they are of three rooms only, one 
over another. 

What an oasis we find here, as we look from the upper windows! 
The houses round about — not Association property — have ruin- 
ous shacks at the rear that hold broken boxes and barrels, super- 
annuated chairs and bedding and broken-down baby carriages. 
There is no clear space to sit under a shade-tree, or plant morning- 
glories, or put a sand-pile. One longs to see the workmen who 
are paving the Octavia Hill courtyard below turn their attention 
to the whole vicinity. 

In the case of the property at 948-952 North Third Street, 
from six privy-wells in the court, which extended partly under 
the kitchens, one hundred barrels of filth in each case were taken. 
From another well ten feet in diameter and twenty-five in depth, 
275 barrels were taken. The figures convey some slight idea of 
the superintendent's task as sanitary engineer. The men, over- 
come by the stench of these vaults which had not been thoroughly 
cleaned — it is said — in eighty years, worked in relays to obtain 
the necessary breathing-spells. 

There were disreputable tenants when the Association came 
to this court; tenants who had influence with powers political 
and defied the new administration to oust them. A law unto 
themselves, they made night both hideous and dangerous to 
respectable neighbors. The drinking, brawling, immoral occu- 
pants had to go, and today's tenants are a very different sort. 

A Serb who inhabits one of the houses in the cement-paved 
court at the rear is secretary of his lodge, and describes with 
pride the school for thirty Serbian children which he and his 
countrymen have started at Third and Brown Streets near by. 
In another house a woman is making some embroidery to be 
sold for her church. She has been working on stems for artificial 
leaves to trim hats, and she has made $3.50 to $5.00 a week 
laboring from dawn to dark, at two cents and a half for a gross 
of stems. But she is happy because she has a good husband, 
and this is pin-money. The children of another house have taken 
a cast-iron bathtub and made for themselves a joyous swimming- 




Court of !)48-!)o2 North Third Street Property., Before Alterations. Sur- 
face Drainage, One Hydrant for Six Families. Toilet Not Under- 
drained and Overflowing at Time of Purchase. 



97 




Court of 1)48-952 Xortii Third Street Property, After Alterations. Each 

House Has 4 Rooms, Water in Kitchen, (J as, Toilet. 

Rent, $8.50 Per Month. 



99 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 101 

pool with a few feet of hose provided by their father. No wonder 
is it that former residents who recently returned to the court 
to visit failed to recognize the place, and were about to retreat 
abashed as trespassers. At the back of the court is a good example 
of the wire fence installed in many places in place of the solid 
board fence, to permit of the free circulation of air. It should 
be noted that the solid blinds of old-time Philadelphia dwellings 
are similar undesirable barriers to the medicinal out-of-doors. 
So many tenants need to be taught the therapeutic virtues of 
fresh air! 

Damp walls constitute a serious problem for the superin- 
tendent. Tenants constantly complain of leakage into cellars. 
Often the water collecting against the sashes of cellar windows 
or seeping under them rots the sashes. If plastering is done 
directly on brick walls, the dampness will come through in cold 
weather and appear in the form of " sweating" on the inside. 
Much experimentation has developed the fact that the cheapest 
and most satisfactory procedure is to give the walls several appli- 
cations of the substance known as tunlin. In some places this 
has been in use three years on the walls and still keeps the moisture 
from coming through. 

By paying cash or by discounting its bills the Association 
has become a desired customer, and the superintendent keeps 
his eye out for a rise in prices or the possibility of a good bargain. 

For instance, in the Kenilworth Street houses we note that 
the new window-sashes are of bass wood, a good-looking and 
easily-handled material. It now costs considerable more than 
it did a little while ago. We find that the superintendent, before 
the price soared, bought a quantity for $15 that would now 
cost $200 at least. It is, he explains, soft enough to work in, old 
enough to have dried out, and the best possible material for 
satisfactory mitre-joints. 

We find that he bought twenty-rive kegs of nails, in anticipa- 
tion of the rise, two days before there was an advance in price 
of 40 cents a keg. When it is necessary in all ways to keep down 
prices for the sake of low rents, and the dividing-line between 
profit and loss is so precisely drawn, a saving of $10 on one such 
transaction is no trifling affair. 



102 GOOD HOUSING- THAT PAYS : 

Nor does the Association save by cheating its tenants as the 
former landlord did in the house where the twenty-seven thick- 
nesses of wall-paper were removed. It was found that this par- 
ticular miscreant had used manure instead of hair as a binder 
for the plaster. 

By standardizing the various minor hardware a further saving 
is effected. There are rim locks of uniform pattern for the outside 
of the door, mortise locks of one type for the inside. 

The paint is of much the same color. That means a match 
is readily obtainable without making a special mixture. 

All houses are fitted up for gas, an inexpressible relief to the 
housekeeper who must otherwise face the hot range in summer. 

Every effort is made to conserve the back-yard trees, and it 
is the superintendent's favorite theory that these trees are meant 
to be sat under and played under, as well as to shade the windows 
and the courts. 

The Association in its office-building at 613-15 Lombard 
Street utilizes the first floor for its own purposes, and rents the 
two upper floors to careful tenants. The repair-shop in the base- 
ment has been mentioned. All day long the tenants of every 
race and condition come to pay the rent or to seek light upon the 
wide range of personal and social problems indicated in the pre- 
ceding pages. They are given to feel that the office is their office, 
and that a deaf ear will never be turned to anyone who really 
needs and honestly deserves counsel. They are receiving free 
of charge — though they may be unaware of the fact — a business 
and a social education. They find the data bearing on their 
individual cases card-catalogued, and if they should be guilty 
of evasion, an accurate system of book-keeping will bring them 
to confusion. No record of a transaction in the business of the 
Association depends upon haphazard recollection or mere say- 
so. The office-hours are conducted without fuss or flurry, the" 
floors are spotless, the desks are cleared for action. Waste motion 
is eliminated, the virtues of thrift and of system are illustrated, 
and still there is heart and human feeling in the enterprise. It 
is not possible to visit the headquarters without realizing at once 
the atmosphere of sincerity and diligence and practical success 
that surrounds the work. It is philanthropy; and it is business. 



V 
DOES IT PAY? 

^yOW we come to the question — does it pay? Obviously 
\i there are two sides to the answer, one the material, the 
other the spiritual. Let us consider, in the first place, 
the actual cash return. 

We have already cited the satisfactory financial results in 
the case of a few typical properties. It is a postulate that those 
who are looking for the largest possible dividend on an invest- 
ment without regard to any other consideration will scarcely 
be satisfied with the 4 per cent, which the Association is paying. 
The stockholders of the Association and the directors as a rule 
are glad to realize that their investment is providing good homes 
for the poor at low cost, and they are content to forego the some- 
what higher profits that might accrue if nobody cared how the 
tenants lived. 

A trust company, in behalf of an estate, had charge of a group 
of small houses erected as model homes for the poor. Under the 
trust company's management, the average gross income from 
these houses for three years was $72 per month and the net in- 
come was $14.34 per month. The property came under the 
control of the Association. During the first two years under the 
new order the gross income was $148, and the net income was 
$70. The trust company, far from the scene, sent a clerk or 
depended on the services of a local real estate agent. Neither 
personally interested himself in the welfare of a tenant. The 
Association sent the friendly rent-collector who immediately 
reported the need of repairs, watched the workmen, stood at all 
times in the closest personal relation to the living problem of 
the householder, and obtained good tenants as soon as vacancies 
occurred, thus reducing to a minimum the losses due to unlets. 

AVe see that under the system of absentee landlordism the 
net returns were about a fifth of the gross receipts, while under 
the system of constant personal vigilance the net returns were 
about one-half of the gross income. 

103 



104 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

The inherent possibilities of the Association's system extended 
to Chambers of Commerce or Boards of Trade or Women's Clubs 
are almost infinite. One of the best rent-collectors the Associa- 
tion has had says that the essential things are "to know the 
value of money and of punctuality, a little housekeeping, a little 
home-making — the rest will come in the doing." Collectors 
of this type, in the employ of the Association, could give inval- 
uable aid as agents to trust companies and other organizations 
that occupy a fiduciary relation toward the owners of property 
in the congested areas. 

The organization and operation of the Model Homes Company, 
formed to build the group of houses in the Richmond district, 
have been described. To show how closely, from long experience, 
the Association figures on the cost of repairs and other expenses, 
a leaf may be taken from the account books of the Model Homes 
Company. These estimates and actual costs are, except as noted, 
for a year ending November 29, 1916. 

Estimated Actual 

Taxes $ 780.00 $ 779.97 

Water rents 382.50 ...... 382.50 

Repairs & allowances. . . 675.00 327.75 (11 mos.) 

Depreciation 450.00. 450.00 

Unlets 302.00 138.10 (11 mos.) 

Losses 9.00 (11 mos.) 

Fire Insurance. ........ 30.88 30.88 

Liability Insurance 26.66 26.68 

Cost of Collection 441.75. ..... 413.60 (11 mos.) 

Interest on Mortgages . . 1,870.00 1,575.36 (11 mos.) 

Here is another example of the profitable handling of houses 
that had seen better days. 

In 1903 the Association bought as agent two four-story brick 
houses about half occupied by a low class of negroes. Even- 
thing within and without was as bad as it could be. The houses 
had been converted from private residences into tenements with- 
out the knowledge of the city authorities. Behind the larger 
houses were six of the little "one, two, three" houses, all served 
bv one hvdrant. The owners had relied entirely on an agent 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 105 

who cared for nothing but the rents. When at last they saw 
what they had on their hands they were horrified, and parted 
with it for a lower price than they had named at first — $4,870.26. 
The alterations and repairs came to $3,214.06. The ground rent 
was $1,700. The insurance was $45.00. Five per cent, commis- 
sion to the Association for making repairs added $160.70, giving 
a total cost of $9,990.02. 

Now let us see what the Association got out of it, after putting 
in toilet facilities, skylights and windows, repairing roofs and 
rain conductors, plastering the walls and painting the woodwork, 
providing fire-escapes and making all minor repairs. In the 
larger houses the weekly rents were 78 cents per room, and in 
the smaller 55 cents per room, or $1.65 for the house. 

The rents in the first year, 1904, were $1,210.95. Taxes were 
$126.21; water rents, $41.50; repairs, $174.37; l l A per cent, 
commission to the Association, $90.80. This gave a balance to 
the owner of $778.07, or a net return of 7.7 per cent, on the invest- 
ment. 

In the year following the rents were $1,203.55, and the balance 
to the owner was $822.81, or 8.2 per cent, net on the investment. 

The Association does not expect to show a return greater 
than 4 per cent.; it does not promise even this. It finds it ad- 
visable in some cases to withhold a return for a time and turn 
back what profits there may be into the improvement of the 
property. This has been done by the express desire of the owners 
in certain instances. A temporary stringency of the market and 
the high cost of building materials or of labor are conditions 
that are instantly reflected in the balance sheet of an organization 
traveling on so close a margin. But prudent husbandly has 
made it possible to show that while the return in exceptional 
instances has fallen below four per cent, it has frequently risen 
to double or nearly double that figure. We have seen that on 
the League Street houses in the Second Ward the return soon 
after occupation was 7.5 per cent, per annum, and these were 
houses in an exceedingly dilapidated condition. The North 
Third Street property from which the hundreds of barrels of 
filth were taken showed a return of six per cent, in the first year. 

The total income of the Association for 1916 was $26,496.23. 



106 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

From rentals there accrued $18,834.23; the agency commissions 
totalled $3,792.84; the dividend on Model Homes Company 
stock was $1,400.00; commissions on new construction and renova- 
tion planned and supervised for other owners amounted to $2,469. 
16. As the expenses of operation came to $17,799.26, the net 
earnings for the year were $8,696.97. The dividend of 4 per cent, 
payable February 1, 1917 left a small balance of $13.26 to add 
to the outstanding surplus of $15,973.01, — a surplus chiefly 
created by gifts and bequests to the Association. 

It should be noted that the above showing is made in spite 
of certain adverse circumstances. Materials and labor had risen 
in price. The sum of $896.40 was charged against the year's 
earnings for repair work undertaken in cooperation with the 
Emergency Aid Committee. A capital stock tax of one-half 
of one per cent., collected on the entire issued capital, covered 
a period of 14 months and amounted to very nearly $1,200. 
Under such conditions as these it would have been impossible 
to maintain the four per cent, dividend without the commissions 
earned on the planning and supervision of new construction and 
initial renovation of agency properties, as well as the customary 
agency fees. There is no doubt that the Association, which is 
very distinctly a philanthropic institution to which the business 
administration is incidental, should be relieved of the heavy 
burden of the capital stock tax. The dividends the Association 
periodically declares are paid to attract investors in dwellings 
for the poor. They are not earned for the sake of enabling those 
who own small houses to amass a fortune. 

Such work as that of the Octavia Hill Association brings 
returns that are beyond the immediate cash appraisal, and 
creates a satisfaction deeper than any that has to do with the 
dollar-sign. In scores of American cities that are now planning 
good homes at low rates for earners of modest wages, made neces- 
sary by the rapid expansion of industrial interests, it is realized 
that it is fundamental to civic prosperity, as well as to individual 
felicity, to give the people who are not rich the fullest measure 
of comfort and happiness procurable for what they are able to 
pay. The public is learning day by day what it has a right to 
expect, and is finding out that the corruption of politics, while 



THE OCTAYIA HILL ASSOCIATION 107 

pretending to confer a benefit, often perpetrates the rankest 
fraud. The taxpayer, intelligently informed, is demanding the 
worth of his contribution to the city treasury. The children 
in school are acquiring that salutary discontent with things as 
they are and that spirit of intelligent interrogation that are the 
conditions precedent to human progress. For it is rightly said 
that asking questions is the beginning of reform. 

Such an understanding as that which the Octavia Hill Associa- 
tion promotes between landlord and tenant pays dividends in 
the supreme pleasure it is to any wise and kind trustee of great 
wealth to know that his money is easing the burden of living 
for the humble toiler. The absentee landlord, content with an 
agent's accounting, who does not care to take the trouble to see 
who occupies his houses and what kind of houses are occupied, 
can never realize the cordial satisfaction that one who takes an 
intimate personal interest in his property experiences. 

The investment is in so much more than bricks and mortar, 
concrete and cast iron. It is an investment in human lives, and 
it underwrites the welfare of the city, the country, the world in 
the age to come by assuring the health and happiness of the un- 
born. If he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew 
before is a benefactor, then what is he who tears down a ram- 
shackle tenement and rears in its place such a house as the Casa 
Ravello, where many families enjoy the privileges of privacy 
and individuality, or a group of houses such as those in the Rich- 
mond district, where the children have abundant play room and 
each occupant controls half his house, or a small home for one 
family of which so many examples are entered on the books of 
the Association in various localities and at varying prices, all 
within a modest range? 

The Octavia Hill investor can be very sure his dividend does 
not come from living-conditions that it would perturb an active 
conscience to know about. There is nothing that need fear 
exploitation. A constant prophylactic scrutiny prevents those 
living conditions that are the shame of every city that in this 
twentieth century tolerates them. 

If the Association were engaged in its blest business for the 
money only, it could not have enlisted through all these years 



108 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

the intense interest of so many who have realized in their own 
experience the correlation of the kind of house a person lives in 
and the kind of character that is therein developed. Too long- 
have we taken it for granted that the poor love to live poorly: a 
survival of the mediaeval tradition that only the nobles had noble 
emotions, and that the crowd merely existed as a foil to the lumin- 
ous brave deeds of a chivalry monopolized by the upper classes. 
Today we feel that 

"The best things any mortal hath 
Are those that every mortal shares," 
and in that faith those who know what it means to have "the 
social conscience" plan and act. 

Year after year the Annual Reports of the Octavia Hill Asso- 
ciation have presented with brevity and precision the summation 
of the progress in the twelve months. Here are set down the 
statement of net earnings, the explanation of unusual expendi- 
tures, the current history of properties long in possession of the 
Association or newly acquired, the transfer of property for any 
reason, the peculiar problems that have presented themselves, 
the formation of subsidiary or contributory bodies, the particular 
objectives in view or the directions in which the Association is 
prepared to offer especially helpful service. The audited Treas- 
urer's Report appended enables one to see in its clear and simple 
presentment where every cent has gone, and what the return 
has been on the Agency Account for each property. But for 
all the explicit story, one still must read between the lines to 
comprehend completely what has been going on in each of the 
homes which — without an odious paternalism — has come under 
the trained and keen observation of the friendly rent-collector 
and the executive superintendent. 

The question of whether the enterprise pays or not is put on 
the highest ground by those who best understand what the Asso- 
ciation is not merely trying to do but effectually doing. Go to 
the little Hector Mcintosh playground and watch the children 
laughing and caroling in the swings, digging in the sandpile and 
pretending a sea-beach, sliding uproariously down their little 
wooden toboggan, racing about at tag, gay as butterflies, and ask 
them if it pays. Go to the mothers in the shade of the trees of 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 109 

Workman Place, or culling fresh vegetables and flowers from their 
own little gardens, there in the thick of the maelstrom of the 
shabbiest part of the city, and ask them. Go to those of the 
negro race who have hitherto been forced to live on the Jim Crow 
leavings of everything, whether they wanted to be clean and 
decent or not, and ask them. But do not ask the landlords who 
are losing money because the poor are discovering what it is 
reasonable to demand of every landlord. Do not ask a miser 
or a skinflint or a misanthrope if it pays. 

This study has been completely a failure if it has not dis- 
closed the fact that sense and sentiment are yokefellows to mutual 
advantage in this undertaking. There must always be those 
for whom philanthropy and business cannot discover a common 
denominator. That is why the personal examples of Octavia 
Hill and of those who follow in her train are of value, for these 
examples prove to a thinking majority that such work as theirs 
is not the altruism of dreamy, vague enthusiasts, but that of 
persons with " their souls in the work of their hands," who are 
translating into a balance on the right side of the ledger their 
aspiration for better things for "the poor and him that hath no 
helper." In twenty-one years this program and its outworking 
have been submitted, not once, but again and again, to the 
pragmatic test, and have emerged triumphant. 

The principles on which the enterprise was founded and is 
conducted promise its immortality and its expansion indefinite. 
It conflicts with no extant organization except the cohesion of 
the predatory forces of greed and deception. It does not mean 
the duplication of effort or the multiplication of superfluous 
offices; it does not economically call for amalgamation with other 
societies of parallel function. It meets a need that is real and 
constant, and it invokes the support and cooperation of good 
citizenship. It must be allowed to help the city more and more, 
and in its turn it must always receive the official aid which has 
been and is generously accorded. 

In every large city a problem similar to that which has faced 
the Association must be met, if the community does not shirk 
the obligation to its own dependent stratum. In every large 
city the prestige of the whole community is impaired if dirty 



110 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS 

streets, a lack of good water, smoke-clogged air and disreputable 
hovels are constituents of the social order. It is a truism that 
wherever a large working population congregates these are evils 
that call for a vigil unceasing. The fundamental advantages 
that make life livable for rich and poor alike are not wafted on 
the breath of a pious aspiration. They come by somebody's 
downright work for them. They come by the banded effort of 
good citizens. They come by an unremitting holy warfare on 
all Apollyon's brood of evils that are the sequel to the reign of 
the spoilsman in politics. If it be a true religion that visits the 
fatherless and the widows in their affliction then this is a work 
that may well engage the attention of the professors of that 
religion, for it keeps a roof over the heads of many who cannot 
satisfy a mercenary landlord's demand. Its appeal is various 
and profound; its outreach is beyond any hard-and-fast limita- 
tion; its record is an open book of progress step by step, season 
by season toward a goal clearly seen from the start. The Octavia 
Hill Association has kept faith with the sainted memory of her 
whose name it bears; it has kept faith with the great public of 
the city which it is destined to serve more largely as its resources 
increase and its assistants multiply; it has kept faith finally, 
with its own ideals, which are those of all who believe in that 
11 far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves." 



APPENDIX I 



OFFICERS AND DIRECTORS OF THE 
OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 

Charles H. Ludington, President 
Curtis Publishing Company. 

Theodore J. Lewis, Vice-President 
Morris Building. 

Joseph R. Carpenter, Jr., Treasurer 
The Pennsylvania Company. 

Miss Helen L. Parrish, Secretary 
313 South Tenth Street, 

Miss Edith F. Biddle Miss Esther Lloyd 

John Irwin Bright Stacy B. Lloyd 

Arthur C. Emlen Dr. Mary T. Mason 

Miss Hannah Fox Earl B. Putnam 

Nathan Hayward Isaac W. Roberts 

Edgar B. Howard Parker S. Williams 

Miss Mary H. Ingham Dr. George Woodward 
Dr. H. R. M. Landis 



OFFICE OF THE ASSOCIATION 
613 and 615 Lombard Street 

Frederick C. Feld, Superintendent 

111 



APPENDIX II 



BY-LAWS OF THE OCTAVIA HILL 
ASSOCIATION 

Article I. Name. 

The name of the Association shall be "The Octavia Hill 
Association." 

Article II. Objects. 

The objects of this Association are as stated in its certificate 
of incorporation, as follows: "Holding, selling and leasing real 
estate." 

The aim is to improve the living conditions in the poorer 
residence districts of the City of Philadelphia. To accomplish 
this purpose the Association buys dwellings and other real estate 
and improves them so as to make them habitable and healthful. 
It endeavors thereby to improve the moral and physical condition 
of the tenants. It offers its services as agent to other owners 
of like properties. In this capacity it attends to collections, 
alterations and repairs, clerical and special work, general over- 
sight, etc., and makes a fair charge for such services. 

Article III. Principal Office. 

Section 1. The principal office of the Company shall be in 
the City of Philadelphia. 

Section 2. All meetings of stockholders of the Company 
and the meeting of Directors shall be held at the office of the 
Company, or other convenient place in the City of Philadelphia. 

Article IV. Meetings. 

Section 1. The annual meeting of the stockholders shall 
be held at such hour and place as the Directors may appoint, 
on the fourth Monday of January in each year. 

112 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 113 

At the annual meeting the Directors shall present a report 
of their proceedings and of their financial transactions, and it 
shall be in order for any stockholder to present for consideration 
any subject relating to the welfare of the Association. Notice 
of all annual meetings to be mailed to the last recorded address 
of each stockholder as furnished to the Secretary as hereinafter 
provided, at least five days before the date of said meeting. 

Section 2. Special meetings of the stockholders may be 
called by order of the Board of Directors when deemed necessary 
by them, or on the written request of at least five stockholders, 
and notice of such meetings shall be given in the same manner 
as above provided in the case of the annual meetings. 

Section 3. The stockholders present in person or by proxy 
at an annual meeting shall constitute a quorum; at special meet- 
ings one-third in interest of the stockholders in person or by 
proxy shall be required to constitute a quorum. All proxies 
shall be dated within ninety days of the meeting when they are 
to be used. 

Section 4. The stockholders at the annual meeting may 
name a maximum sum, all or any part of which in their discretion, 
in such proportions as they see fit, the Directors may appropriate 
as salary for the Officers. 

Section 5. At each annual meeting the stockholders shall 
elect twenty of their own number by ballot, to act as a Board of 
Directors. The majority of the votes cast shall elect. At such 
election the stockholders shall appoint two persons to act as 
Judges of the election, and the election shall be conducted in 
accordance with Section 8 of the Act of Assembly of April 28th, 
1874, regulating corporations. Cumulative voting shall be al- 
lowed as provided for in Section 10 of the said Act of 1874, and 
amended by Act of April 25th, 1876. 

Section 6. The Board of Directors shall hold stated meetings 
on the day and immediately after the annual meeting. It shall 
hold regular monthly meetings at such place and on such day 
and hour as it shall from time to time determine. Special meetings 
shall be held upon the call of the President or two Directors, 



114 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS : 

said call to be mailed to the Board of Directors at least three 
days before the time of meeting. Those Directors who are present 
shall constitute a quorum for the transaction of business, provided 
not less than three are in attendance. 

Article V. Directors. 

Section 1. The business of the corporation shall be managed 
by a Board of twenty Directors who shall be elected by the stock- 
holders at each annual meeting, and shall hold office for one year 
or until their successors shall be chosen. 

Section 2. In case of the death, resignation, disqualification 
or removal of any of the Directors, the Board of Directors may 
fill the vacancy by the election of a member for the unexpired 
term. The Directors shall elect the Officers of the Company, 
viz.: President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer. The 
Secretary and Treasurer may or may not be Directors. 

Section 3. The Directors shall have full authority to make 
contracts and shall take all steps necessary for the conduct of 
the business; they shall have power to appoint whatever officers, 
agents and employees may be necessary to properly carry on 
the business of the Company, and to discharge them at any time, 
and prescribe and fix the compensation of such officers, agents 
or employees, subject to the vote of the stockholders, as pre- 
scribed in Article 4. They shall have full control and manage- 
ment of all the business of the Company, and may delegate to 
such Agent or Agents, as they deem best, such of their powers 
as they may find necessary and for the advantage of the Com- 
pany to so delegate. 

Section h. They shall cause the books of the Treasurer to 
be audited immediately before each annual meeting and shall 
exhibit to the stockholders at the annual meeting, or oftener if 
expedient, a statement or report showing the financial condition 
of the Association; the amount due by the Association, the amount 
of profit and loss sustained during the year. They shall judge of 
the expediency of declaring dividends, and if declared, the amount. 
They shall also report fully upon the moral side of the work. 



THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 115 

Article VI. Duties of Officers. 

Section 1. The President shall perform the usual duties 
of the President, shall attend and preside at all meetings of Stock- 
holders and of the Board of Directors, shall convene the Board 
of Directors whenever in his judgment a session is required, or 
whenever requested to do so, as provided in Article 4. In the 
absence of the President the Board of Directors shall appoint 
a President pro tern. 

Section 2. The Secretary shall act under the direction and 
superintendence of the President, attend all meetings and keep 
in suitable books the minutes thereof, superintend the keeping 
and have charge of the books, papers and records pertaining to 
his office, sign such documents as shall require his signature, 
issue notices for all meetings and perform generally all the duties 
incident to the office of Secretary. 

The address of each stockholder shall be kept by the Secretary, 
which address shall be furnished by the stockholder. He shall 
have custody of the corporate seal, and attest it whenever applied. 

Section 3. The Treasurer shall give bond for the faithful 
discharge of his duties in such sum and with such sureties as 
the Board of Directors from time to time may require. He shall 
have charge of the funds of the corporation, shall keep its ac- 
counts, and exhibit a statement of its affairs at the annual meet- 
ing of the stockholders, and at each regular meeting of the Direc- 
tors. All money belonging to the Company shall be deposited 
in its name in some bank of Philadelphia approved by the Direc- 
tors, and shall be drawn therefrom only by checks signed by the 
Treasurer, who shall pay no bills unless approved in writing by 
the Chairman of the Committee, or of the sub-committee, author- 
ized to contract them. The Treasurer shall keep the stock books 
of the Company in proper form. 

In the Treasurer's absence the Board of Directors may delegate 
one of their number to act as Treasurer wo tern. It shall be 
possible for a Trust Company to act as Treasurer. 

Article VII. Stock Certificates. 
Section 1. Certificates of stock shall be issued under the 



116 GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 

seal of the Company, and be signed by the President and Treasurer 
of the Company and attested by the Secretary. 

Section 2. No transfer of stock shall be allowed except by 
transfer on the books of the Company, in person, by the person 
to whom issued or by his or her duly authorized attorney. The 
Secretary shall cancel the original certificate before signing a 
new one in lieu thereof. 

Section 3. No certificate of stock shall be transferable on 
the books of the Company while the assignor of such certificate 
of stock shall be indebted to the Company, unless a majority 
of the Board of Directors authorize such transfer. 

Section A. Duplicate certificates may be issued for those 
lost or destroyed under such terms as may be prescribed by the 
Board. 

Article VIII. Transfer Books. 

The transfer books of the Company shall be closed for five 
days next preceding the annual election and the days appointed 
for the payment of dividends. 

Article IX. Order of Business. 

1. Roll Call. 

2. Reading the Minutes of the previous meeting. 

3. Report of the Officers or Board. 

4. Reports of Special Committees. 

5. Report of Regular Committees. 

6. Unfinished Business. 

7. Communications. 

8. New Business. 

9. Elections. 

10. Adjournment. 

Article X. Amendments. 

These By-Laws may be altered or amended at any meeting 
of the stockholders duly convened, or at any annual meeting, 
provided notice that an amendment will be offered shall have 
been given in the notice for the meeting. No change shall be 
made in these By-Laws except by vote of two-thirds of the stock 
represented at such meeting. 



APPENDIX III 



Tables Showing Work and Growth, Income and Valuation 
of Property of the Octavia Hill Association 



Growth of Octavia Hill Association, 1896 — 1916 





Properties 




Fam 


[LIES 












Houses 
























Tene- 




One 


Two 


Tene- 


Year 


Total 


Old 


New 


For one 

Family 


For two 
Fami- 
lies 


ment 


Total 


Family 
Houses 


Family 
Houses 


ments 


1896 


5 


5 




4 




1 


10 


4 




6 


1897 


14 


14 




13 




1 


19 


13 




6 


1898 


14 


14 




13 




1 


19 


13 




6 


1899 


31 


31 




30 




1 


36 


30 




6 


1900 


34 


34 




32 




2 


45 


32 




13 


1901 


35 


35 




32 




3 


50 


32 




18 


1902 


40 


40 




36 




3 


56 


36 


2 


18 


1903 


36 


36 




33 


1 


2 


48 


33 


2 


13 


1904 


40 


38 


2 


35 


3 


2 


54 


35 


6 


13 


1905 


39 


37 


2 


34 


3 


2 


53 


34 


6 


13 


1906 


46 


44 


2 


39 


3 


4 


67 


39 


6 


22 


1907 


46 


• 44 


2 


39 


3 


4 


67 


39 


6 


22 


1908 


50 


48 


2 


42 


3 


o 


75 


42 


6 


27 


1909 


65 


61 


4 


54 


6 


5 


93 


54 


12 


27 


1910 


82 


78 


4 


67 


8 


7 


122 


67 


16 


39 


1911 


120 


116 


4 


103 


10 


7 


162 


103 


20 


39 


1912 


124 


112 


12 


101 


16 


7 


172 


101 


32 


39 


1913 


124 


112 


12 


101 


16 


7 


171 


101 


32 


38 


1914 


143 


131 


12 


116 


20 


7 


189 


116 


40 


33 


1915 { 


143 


131 


U2 


cll6 


(20 


7 


(189 


r 116 


<40 


33 


32* 




>32* 


I 16* 


116* 




1 48 


\ 16 


132 




1916 \ 


147 


143 


| 6 


(121 
I 16* j 


J 18 


8 


(196 


(121 


36 


36 


32* 




?32* 


U6* 




i 48* 


I 16* 


32* 

l 





'Includes houses owned by Philadelphia Model Homes Co. 



11' 



118 



GOOD HOUSING THAT PAYS: 



Character and Growth of Agency Properties 



Properties 


No. Families 


Year 


Total 


Old 


New 


One 

Family 


Two 
Family 


Tene- 
ment 


Total 


One 


Two 


More 

than 

two 


1898 


17 


17 




17 






17 


17 








29 


29 




25 




3 


49 


25 


2 


22 




29 


29 




25 


1 


3 


49 


25 


2 


22 




37 


37 




26 


3 


8 


89 


26 


6 


57 




43 


43 




31 


3 


9 


101 


31 


6 


64 




64 


63 


1 


42 


8 


14 


177 


42 


16 


119 




79 


78 


1 


54 


1C 


15 


209 


54 


20 


135 




104 


103 


1 


79 


10 


15 


234 


79 


20 


135 




120 


117 


3 


88 


11 


21 


287 


88 


22 


177 


1907 


120 


117 


3 


88 


11 


21 


287 


88 


22 


177 




145 


142 


3 


111 


13 


21 


321 


111 


26 


184 




176 


173 


3 


140 


15 


21 


357 


140 


30 


187 




182 


178 


4 


143 


16 


23 


346 


143 


32 


171 




179 


175 


4 


140 


16 


23 


343 


140 


32 


171 




181 


177 


4 


141 


14 


26 


386 


141 


28 


217 




189 


185 


4 


141 


13 


32 


392 


141 


26 


222 


1914 


210 


206 


4 


168 


11 


37 


435 


168 


22 


251 


1915 


220 


210 


4 


170 


11 


39 


451 


170 


22 


259 


1916 


228 


214 


13 


172 


18 


38 


464 


172 


36 


256 




Returns on the Four Oldest Properties 



Property 


Years 

Acquired 


Net 

Return 

1900 


Net 

Return 

1915 


Net 

Return 

1916 


518 So. 7th St. 
529 Lombard St. 
Front & League Sts. 
514 S. 7th St. 


1896 
1897 
1899 
1900 


4.8% 
4.6% 

4.5% 
3.1% 


5.6% 

5.8% 

5.3% 

• 5.2% 


5.4% 
5.6% 
4.6% 
1.5% 



THE OCTAYIA HILL ASSOCIATION 



119 



Income from Typical Properties 



Location 
of Properties 


Date of 
First 
Care 


Income 
First 
Year 


Income 

Second 

Year 


Income 
1915 


Income 
1916 


Franklin Court 


1906 


$1,394.38 


$1,534.68 


$1,475.09 


$1,474.59 


502-4-6 Kater St. 


1898 


437.20 


410.50 


468.00 


468.00 


510 South 7th St. 


1903 


357.35 


431.20 


454.83 


449.70 


708 Lombard St. 


1909 


710.75 


720.00 


725.50 


* 


304 League St. 


1909 


241.50 


227.00 


268.25 


274.50 


241-3 Queen St. 


1910 


621.75 


724.50 


826.05 


939.93 


414-6 Perth St. 


1903 


263.75 


334.00 


336.00 


336.00 


Webster St. 


1899 


909.40 


968.95 


1,055.50 


1,024.00 


422 Perth St. 


1904 


165.00 


162.00 


168.00 


168.00 


Rodman & Nau- 












dain Sts. 


1901 


1,122.50 


1,166.33 


1,263.25 


1,207.25 


521 Randolph St. 


1907 


280.25 


238.25 


293.00 


288.00 


510 Reese St. 


1899 


222.00 


228.35 


270.00 


250.75 


523 Reese St. 


1901 


446.71 


483.95 


562.05 


535.15 



* Under Alteration in 1916. 



The Salaried Workers 





Monthly 
Salary 


Octavia Hill 
Association Properties 


Agency Properties 


Staff 


% of time 


Amount of 
Salary 


% of time 


Amount of 
Salary 


A 
B 
C 
D 
E 
F 


$200.00 
83.33 
65.00 
70.00 
50.00 
50.00 


66.67 
47.91 
50.00 
18.97 
66.67 
43.25 


$133.34 
39.93 
37.50 
13.08 
33.34 
21.62 


33.33 
52.09 
50.00 
81.03 
33.33 
56.75 


$66.66 
43.40 
32.50 
56.91 
16.60 
28.38 


Total 


$518.33 




$273.82 




$244.51 



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THE OCTAVIA HILL ASSOCIATION 



m 







Rent Collections 




Year 


Value of Pro- 


Rents Col- 


Year 


Value of Prop- 


Rents Col- 


perty 


lected 


erty 


lected 


1896 


$10,500.00 


$466.70 


1906 


60,807.20 


5,688.09 


1897 


18,705.00 


1,001.17 


1907 


62,496.53 


6,339.89 


1898 


20,048.90 


1,709.91 


1908 


68,285.41 


6,346.70 


1899 


30,386.13 


2,567.43 


1909 


82,474.35 


7,455.12 


1900 


35,965.27 


3,187.08 


1910 


109,530.19 


9,254.92 


1901 


39,160.27 


3,381.36 


1911 


148,216.13 


11,623.13 


1902 


42,493.85 


4,142.85 


1912 


180,012.95 


14,149.92 


1903 


39,213.18 


5,271.45 


1913 


181,347.78 


15,295.08 


1904 


49,564.21 


4,772.40 


i 1914 


210,031.83 


17,585.60 


1905 


47,789.95 


4,962.36 


1 1915 


228,031.83 


18,444.74 








1 1916 


276,026.63 * 


24,672.50* 


^Include 


s value and coUectio 


ns of the Philadclpbi 


a Model Homes Co. 





PHILADELPHIA MODEL HOMES COMPANY 

The Returns for 1916. (See pages 60-65.) 

Total Possible Income from January 1st, 1916 to Dec. 31st, 1916 
Unlets 

Total Net Collections 



>, 144.00 
124.35 



5,019.65 



EXPENSES 

Repairs 

State and Federal Taxes 

Citv Taxes, 1916 

Water Rents, 1916 

Insurance, Fire and Liability 

One-half of one month's rent to tenants. . . 
Interest on $43,550 at 4.4% per annum . . . 

Depreciation 

73^% Commission on Collections 



S265.35 
120.27 
779.97 
382.50 
75.97 
129.40 

1,916.20 
500.00 
451.40 



Cost of Lot $10,332.50 

Cost of Houses 53,217.50 



$4,621.06 
$1,398.59 



Total $63,550.00 

Cash Invested bv Octavia Hill Association . . . $20,000 00 



On mortgages at 4.4% per annum $43,550.00 

Net Percentage on $20,000 invested by Octavia Hill Association. . . .6.6' ( 



Reports of the Philadelphia Housing Association may be had from the 
Secretary. John Ihlder, at 130 South Fifteenth Street. A list, of Low-Cost 
Housing Developments in the United States, carefully annotated by -Mr. 
Nolen, is given in the pamphlet entitled "A Good Home for Every Wage 
Earner.'" by John Nolen, Sc.D., City Planner; published by the American 
Civic Association. Union Trust Building, Washington, D. ('. 



INDEX 

Page 

Agency properties, 71, 74 

Agnes Irwin School, 44 

Alms-giving; deprecated by Miss Hill, 15 

Alpha Pi Fraternity, 44 

Amsterdam, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Animals on premises, 37, 38 

Artisans Dwelling Act, 15 

Ashes, 84 

Association, the Octavia Hill: 

Its function, 8, 9 

Its name, 11 

Its history, 21 — 75 

Its scope and field of effort, 77 — 102 

Its financial returns,. 103 

Ayres, Alice, 16 

Babies, 33 

Bachelors, 74 

Bath-tubs, 34 

Berlin, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Boy Scouts, 19 

Bricklaying, 8, 32 

Browning Societies, 11 

Building Association, Benevolent, 22 

Building Inspection, Bureau of, 34 

Burial Grounds, 17. 19 

Cadets, 19 

Carpentering, 8, 32, 66 

Casa Ravello, 33 

Catharine Street 33 

Chaucer, 20 

Chicago, 21 

Civic Club (Philadelphia), 21, 22, 25, 31 

Clark, Mr. and Mrs. E. W., 43, 44 

Collins, Ellen, 17 

Crane, Walter, 16 

Crenshaw, Nathaniel B., 22 

Croats, 21 

Dancing, 34 

Deptford, 16 

Dinwiddie, Emily W., 34—39 

Directors (of the Association), 26 

Dividends, 26, 60, 103—106 

123 



12-1 INDEX 

Page 

Doctors, 33 

Dundee, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Ecclesiastical Commissioners, 16 

Edinburgh, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Emergency Aid, 66 

Fairhill Street property, 31 

Feld, Frederick C, 27, 65 

Flag-raising, 51 

Flowers, use of , 18, 34, 44 

Fox, Hannah, 22, 34 

"Friendly rent-collector": her function, 8, 18, 77—93, 104 

Front Street, 43 

Games for children, 14 

Garbage, , 38, 84 

Gardens, home and school, 14, 59 

Garrison, Miss, 27 

Germantown, 51, 52 

Gifford, Edith Wright, 22 

Girard Estate, 72 

Glasgow, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Good Neighbors' Club, 43 

Gould, Dr. E. R. L., 77 

Graveyards, 17, 19 

Hampstead Heath, 16 

Hardware, 101, 102 

Head, Mrs. E. L., 52 

Health, Board of, 34, 40 

Hector Macintosh Playground, 33 

Hill, James, 11 

Hill, Octavia 

Her "legacy," 8 

Her life and work 11—20, 26, 77, 94 

"Homes of London Poor" (Miss Hill's book), 17, 18 

Houses, various types of, acquired by Association, 28, 31 

Housing Association, 40 

Italians, 33, 38, 59, 92 

Jenks, M-s. William F 22 

Jews, 21, 28 

Kingsley, Charles, inspires Miss Hill, . 12 

Kirkbride, Mrs. Thomas S., 25 

Kyrle Society, 17 

Laborers, 38 

Landlords, 39, 83 

League Street property, 31, 32, 33 

Legacies, 71 



INDEX 125 

Page 

Legislation, 39. 40 

"Letters to My Fellow-workers" (Miss Hill's book), 18 

Lombard Street property, 31 

London, Octavia Hill in, 11 — 20 

Longstreth, Mrs. Edward, 31 

Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 17 

Ludington, Charles H., 74 

MacMillan's Magazine, 16 

Mahomet's coffin, 7 

Manning, Caroline, 40 

"Massenhotels," 21 

Mifflin family, . . . 43 

Miller, E. Spencer, 37 

Model Homes Company, Philadelphia, 60, 104 

Mothers' Club, . . 33 

Multiple dwellings, 7 

Music, '.....-" 14. 19, 34, 51 

Naudain Street, 66 

Negroes, 33, 66, 93, 95, 104 

New houses, building of, 72 

New Orleans, 21 

Nurses, 33 

Office force (of Association), 27, 102 

Old Swedes' Church, 32 

Open spaces, 15 

"Our Common Land" (Miss Hill's book), 8 

Painting, 32, 66, 94 

Parliament, Hill, 16 

Parrish, Helen L., 26, 31, 34 

Pemberton Street, 43 

Pembroke, Lord, 16 

Penn, William, 44 

Personal workers, 39 

Philadelphia : 

City of homes, 7 

"Under the Lid", 21 

Philadelphia Model Homes Company, 60 

Philanthropy, 25, 26 

Plastering, 8, 32, 66 

Playgrounds, 14, 19, 33, 34, 51, 52, 60 

Plumbing, 8, 25, 32, 37, 85, 94 

Poles, 21, 51, 91 

Poor laws, 17 

Privy-wells, 96, 105 

Properties, classification of agency, 71 



126 INDEX 

Page 

Red Cross cottages, 16 

Rent-collecting: duties of " friendly rent-collector," 8,18,77—93,104 

Rents, 18, 32, 33, 34, 52, 65, 71, 75, 93, 103 

Richmond (Kensington), 51, 59 

Royal Commission, 17 

Ruskin, John: his assistance in Miss Hill's plans, 12, 13, 14 

San Francisco, 21 

Serbs, 96 

Seventh Street, 33 

Sewage, 37 

Shaen, Mrs., letter from, 14 

Shakespeare Societies, 11 

Shick, Robert P., 34 

Singing Community, 14 

Slovaks, 21 

Smith, Southwood, 11 

Social Science Association, 15 

Southwark, „ 16, 33 

Starr, Theodore, 22, 31 

Starr Centre Association, 33 

Stock, issues of, 26 

Summer school, 33 

Superintendent: his work, 8, 9, 94 — 102 

"Sweating," 39 

Sweden, Miss Hill's influence in, 17 

Taylor, Frank H., . 25 

Tenants, 18, 32, 33, 39, 65, 72, 77, 83, 84 

Tenements, 7, 37, 39 

Tibet, 38 

Trust, National, 17 

Tunlin, 101 

Types of houses, 28 

University of Pennsylvania, 44 

University Settlement, Women's, 17 

Van Gasken, Dr. Frances C, 34 

Veiller, Lawrence, 37 

Vienna, 21 

Volunteer service, 27, 72 

Whittier Centre, . 66 

Wilson, Alexander. 32 

Women, Employment of, 11 

Wood, R. Francis, 26 

Woodward, Dr. George, '. 33, 37 

Workman Place, 43 

Yom Kippur , 38 



391 




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